In the eighteenth century, itinerant artists traveled through New England painting “landskips” for overmantels, doors, and walls. These pictures, often derived from prints after landscapes by English and French artists or even wallpaper designs, were often embellished with local references to buildings or landscapes.

This example was once part of the woodwork of a second-story bedroom in the Hawkes house on Washington Street in Marblehead. It features a variety of structures, specifically, two three-story homes, both with columned porticoes, as well as a rolling landscape dotted with trees, ducks, cows, birds, and various human figures. These—a reclining male, a young Black male with a dog and horse, a strolling woman, another young male, and a seated couple, one of whom drinks from some sort of stemware—are delightfully out of scale and proportion to one another. The Black figure, possibly a depiction of an enslaved servant, serves as a reminder that eighteenth-century New England had a notable Black population, most of whom were enslaved, working in variety of trades and domestic settings. 

Related examples: Perhaps the same hand produced the overmantel for the Jeremiah Lee Mansion in Marblehead, Massachusetts (Marblehead Historical Society).

Adapted from: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.