John A. Prescott House
About This Tour
As you explore this bedchamber, compare the vibrantly colored scenes painted on the upper walls to the monochromatic views found on the lower walls.
The exterior of the John A. Prescott House was recently (2022) repainted. Surviving original details include the entry door surround and the Palladian window at the second floor.
The John A. Prescott House
The John A. Prescott House was built in 1828 in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, a mill village then known as Squantum. John A. Prescott (1793–1860) was a successful mill owner and entrepreneur who replaced an older structure known as “The Mansion” with the extant Federal house. While this architectural style shares much in common with its Georgian predecessor, including its box–like and symmetrical design, there is more elaborate ornamentation around the house’s doorways. Here, the entry door has leaded sidelights, a leaded fanlight, and a more recent portico. At the second floor, a Palladian-inspired window is framed by
pilasters. Instead of the more typical arch–topped sash, the center window has a flat top and is capped with a louvered fan.
The Prescott House murals were most likely painted at the same time as those in the Prescott Tavern, a business owned by John A. Prescott’s father, Revolutionary War veteran and prominent Jaffrey resident, Colonel Benjamin Prescott (1754–1839). There are many similarities between these murals and the Tavern murals, which were salvaged before the building was demolished in 1950. The seascape portion of the Tavern murals can be viewed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, while the Prescott House remains under private ownership.
This bedchamber wall has a frieze of ferns and stenciled roses, and scenes in grisaille, or shades of gray, below the “chair rail.” The water scene on the upper portion of the wall features stenciled houses on an island, ships, and elm trees in the foreground.
In this close–up view of a water scene, one can see a man in a top hat sailing a skiff. Two of the stenciled houses on the island have smoke billowing from their chimneys.
The bedchamber wall was wallpapered over. Removal of the paper revealed the stenciled and stippled frieze, pointed mountains in a rich blue, and a large, stenciled house. The faux chair rail separates the grisaille painting on the lower wall from the vibrant, colorful scenes on the upper wall.
About the Art
While the front bedroom can be seen on this tour, the house’s hallway, stairway, and front parlor walls were decorated in a similar manner and fragments of painted scenes can be seen peeking out from underneath layers of wallpaper. Covering murals with wallpaper was common practice, as evidenced by the remaining flowered wallpaper next to the bedroom door in this room. The intense color of the murals would have been even more vivid at the time it was first painted. Some of the color has been lost due to time and due to the damage caused by the removal of the wallpaper.
The mural in the front bedchamber offers a variety of unique elements to study. While it can be attributed to an artist of the Porter School (artists painting motifs and layouts in the style of muralist and inventor Rufus Porter (1782–1884) some elements in this room are not typical of Porter walls. For example, a border of stippled greenery and stenciled rosebuds runs along the ceiling and down the walls at each corner of the room. Borders were not common in rooms with Porter School murals. This border motif also appears in other houses in the area.
The change to a monochromatic color scheme on the lower portion of the wall served to compliment the decoration of the rest of the walls while not distracting from any furniture that might have rested against the walls. It is recognized that Rufus Porter excelled at “grisaille” — painting in shades of gray — and did so in several Massachusetts buildings including the Harvard Inn in Harvard, the Savery House in Groveland, and the Ingalls–Colby House in Haverhill. The presence of monochromatic painting here, however, is not enough evidence to suggest that Porter might have painted these walls or those at the Prescott Tavern. The mural’s general style, and many of its motifs, are not typical of what we know of Porter, making it unlikely that it was his hands that painted these walls.
As in the water walls of the Prescott Tavern and the Squire Cragin House in Greenfield, New Hampshire, the artist here used vermillion–colored paint to depict a sunset instead of the more standard sky colors of blue and white. The mural wraps around to the adjacent wall where a white building with a red roof sits in the foreground, with bright blue mountains behind it.
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If the visitor looks down, a unique element is revealed. To the bottom right of the fireplace is an erupting volcano. The inclusion of the volcano is an interesting departure from the fictional but believable scenes of idyllic New England that Porter School artists typically painted. The murals in the Prescott Tavern also include a depiction of a smoking volcano.
Note the painted black line suggesting a chair rail and the exploding volcano painted in grisaille. An 1833 publication referred to volcanoes as “burning mountains.”