The Dutton House is an exhibit building at Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont; it is also known as the Salmon Dutton House. [1]
Dutton House was the first dwelling brought to the museum property. [2] In order to relocate the structure to the museum grounds, builders dismantled the house. Museum workers photographed the house prior to and while the house was being dismantled. Samples of each stenciled border were excised from the plaster walls. These samples were used as models for recreating the stenciled decoration of Dutton House's interior. The sunburst stencil painted motif over a second-floor fireplace mantle was also retained and installed in the re-erected house. Museum workers added dentil molding, copied from a house in Alburg, Vermont, to the structure's cornice. [1]
Salmon Dutton built Dutton House in Cavendish, Vermont, in 1781. Having emigrated from Massachusetts, Dutton worked as a road surveyor, a justice of the peace, and the treasurer of the town of Cavendish. Like many of his contemporaries, Dutton used his house as both a residence and place of business. [3] Continuing his tradition, Dutton's descendants, who occupied the house until 1900, operated Dutton House as a store, an inn, and a boarding house for local mill workers. [2] Although Dutton originally constructed Dutton House in the indigenous saltbox style, he and his descendants expanded the structure as the building's function changed over time. The many additions that extend from the saltbox core reflect the tradition of "continuous" architecture common in New England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [3]
In the late 1940s Redfield Proctor Jr., Dutton's great-great-grandson, offered the house to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England. As part of considering the house, architect Frank Chouteau Brown measured and delineated the house and its stencil-painted walls for the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1946. [4] Ultimately, Proctor donated the house to the Vermont Historical Society; however, in 1950 when the Vermont Highway Department's planned road improvements threatened the structure, the society offered it to Shelburne Museum. [5]
Nineteenth-century American homeowners employed many methods in ornamenting their interiors. Rich paint colors and wallpaper were widely available in America as early as 1725, and by 1830 thousands of trade painters offered wallpapering, mural painting, and stenciling among their marketable talents. Shelburne Museum's collection includes examples of all three types of wall treatments.
Members of the upper class often imported French and English wallpaper to adorn formal rooms such as parlors, ballrooms, and dining rooms. These papers frequently represented scenic landscapes and possessed bright colors and bold patterning that could stand out even in weak candlelight.
Mural painting offered an equally decorative but less expensive mode of adornment for those who could not afford to import expensive papers. Jonathan Poor, and his partner, Paine, worked as limners. Traveling around Maine, they offered their services as decorative painters charging $10 for a completed room. Represented in the museum's collection is an ornamental over-mantel and chimney-surround that Poor and Paine created in about 1830. Designed as part of a painted chamber of landscape murals, these paintings, with their views of busy harbors, farms, and forests, are outstanding examples of a decorative technique that is frequently lost to demolition.
In the early nineteenth century, itinerant artists would stencil walls in exchange for room and board. These artists would cut patterns from thin wood or heavy paper and use them to decorate walls and furniture. Stencil House's parlor, dining room, and entrance hall exhibit a variety of stenciled patterns, including a grape leaf border, vases of flowers, and patriotic eagles.
The stencil painting in the Dutton House can be found in the front four rooms and, by and large, is only found along the outer borders of the plaster walls, dating to about 1800. [6] A sunburst is painted over the fireplace mantle in one of the second floor rooms, and is the only plaster replaced in the house after the move from Cavendish. Samples of each of the borders from the four rooms were removed and served as guides when the house was re-erected in Shelburne. Motifs used in the Dutton House borders are found in other houses in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. One of the motifs, a freehand decoration used in a first floor room, is also found in the Grimes House in Keene, New Hampshire. The stencil-painted decoration in that house has been attributed to either Jothan Stearns or Jedutham Bullin, thus one of them may have painted the Dutton House interiors. [6]
A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage.
Cavendish is a town in Windsor County, Vermont, United States. The town was likely named after William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire. The population was 1,392 at the 2020 census. The town of Cavendish includes the unincorporated villages of Cavendish and Proctorsville.
Wallpaper is used in interior decoration to cover the interior walls of domestic and public buildings. It is usually sold in rolls and is applied onto a wall using wallpaper paste. Wallpapers can come plain as "lining paper" to help cover uneven surfaces and minor wall defects, "textured", plain with a regular repeating pattern design, or with a single non-repeating large design carried over a set of sheets.
The Vermont State House, located in Montpelier, is the state capitol of the U.S. state of Vermont. It is the seat of the Vermont General Assembly. The current Greek Revival structure is the third building on the same site to be used as the State House. Designed by Thomas Silloway in 1857 and 1858, it was occupied in 1859.
Shelburne Museum is a museum of art, design, and Americana located in Shelburne, Vermont, United States. Over 150,000 works are exhibited in 39 exhibition buildings, 25 of which are historic and were relocated to the museum grounds. It is located on 45 acres (18 ha) near Lake Champlain.
Faux painting or faux finishing are terms used to describe decorative paint finishes that replicate the appearance of materials such as marble, wood or stone. The term comes from the French word faux, meaning false, as these techniques started as a form of replicating materials such as marble and wood with paint, but has subsequently come to encompass many other decorative finishes for walls and furniture including simulating recognisable textures and surfaces.
The Prentis House, built in 1773 in Hadley, Massachusetts, by the Dickinson family, is typical of the indigenous style of saltbox architecture that developed in New England during the Colonial period and remained in use, particularly in rural areas, through the American Revolution. The Prentis House was relocated to the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, and furnished with 17th and 18th century period furniture and decorative arts.
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Stencil House, built in 1804 on one hundred-acre farm in Columbus, New York, was modeled after a Capen house, a small, side-gabled structure prevalent throughout the colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Named after Parson Joseph Capen of Topsfield, Massachusetts, who built one of the earliest such structures in 1692, Capen houses reflect the British influence on early Puritan architecture. The house is now an 18th-century period historic house museum located at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont.
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Mural with Blue Brushstroke is a 1986 mural painting by Roy Lichtenstein that is located in the atrium of the Equitable Tower in New York City. The mural was the subject of the book Roy Lichtenstein: Mural With Blue Brushstroke. The mural includes highlights of Lichtenstein's earlier works.
Ann Agee is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance. Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware. Art in America critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir."
EverGreene Architectural Arts (EverGreene) is the largest specialty contractor in the U.S., providing design, restoration, conservation, and adaptive reuse services to commercial, government, institutional, sacred, and theater clients. Established in 1978 by Jeff Greene, EverGreene has grown from a small mural painting studio to a company of artists, conservators, craftsmen, and designers that work throughout the United States and abroad.
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Grasse Mount is a campus building of the University of Vermont (UVM), which is located on 411 Main Street in Burlington, Vermont. Built in 1804 for Captain Thaddeus Tuttle (1758–1836), a local merchant, the building was designed by architect and surveyor John Johnson and constructed by carpenter Abram Stevens. By 1824, Tuttle had lost his fortune and sold the property to Vermont Governor Cornelius Van Ness. Named after French Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse "Grasse Mount" was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 11, 1973.
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Decorative painting in the Hälsingland region of Sweden has been practiced as a folk art tradition since the 16th century. Employed as a means of interior decoration in Hälsingland farmhouses, the tradition has been practiced by mostly self-taught and now forgotten artists. Wall paintings were usually applied with distemper paint after covering the hard wooden surface with coarse linen. Decorative painting of furniture was also a ubiquitous manifestation of the art style. Religious themes were predominant until the 18th century, after which the selection of motifs became more diverse. The first reliable attributions of preserved interiors to named artists concern works from that time period. During the early 19th century, classically trained artists started participating in, and influencing, the style, while an influx of folk artists skilled in the Dalcarlian tradition made their mark in the region. The practice of decorating walls with the assistance of stencils was also introduced as a more economical alternative to fashionable, but still very expensive, printed wallpaper. By the end of the 19th century the folk art tradition had degenerated and went into decline.