Details of one of the murals in The Rufus Porter Museum, circa 1825-28.
Lindberg was poring over Jean Lipman's1968 book, Rufus Porter: Yankee Pioneer,when she discovered Porter's connection to a place her own family has often returned. In 1922, Lindberg's grandfather, a Rhode Island osteopath and avid fisherman, bought a one-room camp on Highland Lake, 40 miles northwest of Portland, Maine. Her grandmother's first response was tears, but the family grew to love their rustic retreat.
The compound now extends to three houses shared by several generations. Built in 1954, Julie and Carl's lakeside property is a repository for all things Maine. Knotty pine paneling and braided rugs provide a comfortable backdrop for quilts, decoys, enamelware, yellowware, natural and geological specimens, Indian artifacts and paintings by local artists.
The Porters' farm stood four miles away. From high on a ridge with views to New Hampshire's White Mountains, the Porters once herded their livestock down the hill to nearby Moose Pond, a long, dark lake shaded by feathery-looking trees at the foot of gently rounded Pleasant Mountain. Anyone who has studied Porter's landscapes will instantly recognize the artist's inspiration. Hipped-roof Federal houses like the kind Porter depicted can be spotted nearby on Bridgton's green.
Views of Portland - including the harbor, the observatory and militia men drilling - also appear in Porter's murals, as do references to Hawaii, where the artist traveled between 1817 and 1819. In 1807, Porter walked to Portland, where he remained until 1816, working as a house painter and a decorator of walls, floors and furniture. A year after he married in 1815, the artist moved to New Haven, Conn., where he taught music, ran a dancing school and began painting miniatures. To aid him in his work, the itinerant artist used a camera obscura, which he pulled along with him on a cart.
Porter's career as a muralist was at its height between 1824 and 1845. Thereafter, scientific pursuits captured his imagination. Porter experimented with electrotype and the telegraph, bought an interest in the New York Mechanic in 1840 and founded Scientific American in 1845. "A mechanical Johnny Appleseed," as Lipman described him, Porter died in New Haven in 1884.
Plans for a Rufus Porter museum in Bridgton arose after a magnificent set of Porter murals, 15 in all, unexpectedly turned up in June 2002 at Jackson's International Auctioneers & Appraisers in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The only set that is both signed and dated, the 1838 paintings on plaster were removed intact from the Dr Francis Howe house in Westwood, Mass., when it was demolished in 1965. In 1984, after changing hands several times, the paintings were given to Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Iowa. The largest mural is nearly 12 by 7 feet.
First photographed in 1925 and subsequently illustrated in Rufus Porter, The Flowering of American Folk Art and American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, the murals are also signed by the artist's son, Stephen Twombley Porter. Rufus Porter is known to have collaborated with his nephew Jonathan Poor and Moses Eaton Jr, as well. Executed on dry plaster applied to lath, the paintings depict pastures, farmhouses and soft hills swelling from behind elongated lakes dotted with sailing ships and steamboats.
