Enoch Robie House
About This Tour
Explore four muraled chambers and see the different styles and scenes in each. The rooms appear to have been painted by multiple artists.
The interior of the ca. 1784 Enoch Robie House retains multiple styles of early nineteenth-century decorative techniques including faux finishes, two rooms of stenciling, and four rooms of muraled walls.
The Enoch Robie House
The Enoch Robie House was built sometime around 1784 in Deerfield, New Hampshire by Enoch Robie. Robie purchased the land in 1766 from his father, Thomas Robie, one of the twenty founders of the town of Deerfield. The house’s ownership history is well documented. Robie sold the property to Enoch Prescott in 1798, who then sold it in the same year to Dr. Seth Fogg. In 1821 the house was sold to Sherborne Fogg and in 1826 Fogg sold it to Stephen Prescott and Capt. Joseph Merrill. Only two years later, it was purchased by Stephen W. Nichols, whose son Nicholas Nichols sold it to Judith Rollins in 1898. In 1977 the present owner purchased the house from Judith Rollins’ daughter, Minnie.
Early to mid-nineteenth century murals often included a water scene with a variety of ships and boats and distant islands.
The scenes painted in this bedchamber include a suspension bridge and a curiously tall building.
The Robie House murals include several bridges. This scene is labeled “View of the City of Carlisle and its Bridge.” The bridge appears to be the Eden Bridge, a five-arch stone in Carlisle, England that was completed in 1815.
The murals in this house are located in four unheated chambers on the second floor. Each room has different scenes and the murals appear to have been painted by more than one artist. In one bedroom, the murals depict an idealized, bucolic water scene — a popular subject in early nineteenth-century New England wall painting.
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The next three rooms are stylistically different from the first and the color palette changes, suggesting a different hand. One room has art on two of its walls, another has a mural on a single wall, and the last has murals on all four walls. The muralist — or muralists? — painted four different bridges, an interesting departure from the man-made elements such as houses and sailing vessels more typically depicted in painted walls in New England. Another intriguing element is the skyscraper that appears in a village scene. Assuming that this mural was painted in the early nineteenth century, skyscrapers would not be built for another seventy-five years. How can this explained? Perhaps this is a fantastical structure from the artist’s imagination.
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Although they are not included in this Virtual Tour, there are several architectural and decorative elements in the Robie House that deserve recognition. The front hall is decorated with block-printed wallpaper that dates to 1808, and the stairway has a painted runner. The downstairs dining room and parlor walls retain remnants of early of stenciled designs, and the floor is painted with a smoke-grained decoration.
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The parlor stenciling does not appear to be the work of Moses Eaton but may possibly be the work of an early stenciler who painted in the Deerfield area (see Janet Waring’s book, Early American Stencils pages 66-68).
About the Art
The art in this room is distinct from the other rooms in its painting style, color palette, and subject matter. It is also the only room in the Robie House with a painted wainscot.
Wallpaper removal exposed the original stenciling in the parlor.
The smoke-grained floor in the parlor is a rare surviving example of an early nineteenth century decorative technique.