New England murals, however, far predate conceptual art. We've been painting on walls in these parts for nearly 300 years. The Warner House in Portsmouth, N.H., claims to have the oldest Colonial wall paintings "still in place" in the country. Shortly after the house was constructed in 1716-18, an anonymous artist covered the walls with subjects ranging from a woman spinning, to biblical scenes, to a depiction of two Native American sachems visiting the queen of England.
But New England's acknowledged early master of the house mural was Rufus Porter (1792-1884), an itinerant painter and inventor who also founded Scientific American. Between 1825 and 1845, he and his assistants painted the walls of several hundred buildings in New England and New York.
"He traveled all along the Eastern Seaboard painting miniatures. Then he abruptly switched to landscape easel paintings," says Nancy Smoak, project manager of the Rufus Porter Museum in Bridgton, Maine. "They didn't sell very well, so he started doing them on walls."
The Porter Museum, which opened in 2005, preserves a house decorated with Porter murals and also displays Porter's masterpiece cycle, the Westwood Murals (from the Dr. Francis Howe home in Westwood) in another building. Porter was quite sophisticated for a painter without formal training. His Hawaiian-influenced flora and use of vanishing-point perspective and shadows set his work apart from other untutored landscape painters of the era. (If you would like to sleep surrounded by a Porter mural, check into the Hancock Inn in Hancock, N.H.)
Porter, who also tried to interest investors in his design for an airship in the 1830s, was clearly ahead of his time. The golden age of mural painting in the United States wouldn't arrive until a century later. Perhaps the most famous American muralist in the 1930s was Thomas Hart Benton, a Midwesterner who settled in New York and summered on Martha's Vineyard.
