Meetinghouses of Early New England

10: A Fleeting Image

264 C H A P T E R T E N A Fleeting Image  Whether viewed as a weakening of sixteenth-century Calvinism, a gradual expansion of the sacraments, or the rhetorical republicanism of a new political era, the architectural transformation described here may have had a visual aspect to it that has hitherto remained obscure. The resurgence of English culture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England may explain the re- fined architectural motifs of entry porticos and bell towers designed in Federal and Greek Revival styles, but it also helps us better interpret the populist scope of New England’s early nineteenth-century churchgoing experience. At the same time that Charles Bulfinch, Asher Benjamin, and Elias Carter were bringing the church plan into the region’s rural communities, poorly trained and untrained artists were introducing painted religious images and religiously oriented decorative work into the pulpit area and its immediate surrounds. While almost no traces of these images have survived, the number of times they are cited in New England town histories, diary entries, and personal reminiscences, together with the compelling—if sometimes critical—detail of their descriptions, suggests that at least some rural meetinghouses were decorated with art whose ultimate purpose was similar to the “churchly” and “republican” changes taking place in meetinghouse architecture. In other words, the religious impulses that sought out Georgian and Federal aesthetics to refine urban and suburban meetinghouses were also drawing on naïve artisanship and image-making to “refine” isolated or rural ones. One indication is the increasing use of painted or inscribed religious maxims, especially those that evoked attention to a newly built house of worship. William Bentley recorded three such maxims in a trip through northern Essex County in 1793. In the new meetinghouse in South Andover he found a pendant canopy with an inscription from Psalm 93:5: “Holiness becomes thy house O Lord, forever .” The next day in Bradford, Massachusetts, he recorded a maxim from 1 Chronicles 16:29: “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” It, too, was inscribed in gold paint on the canopy of the new meetinghouse and he noted A Fleeting Image 265 that the clergyman used this text for the dedication of the house. Later that day Bentley also found the cipher “IHS” painted on the pulpit front of the meetinghouse in North Andover—the same congregation that had insisted that no “medallions, dentals or carved work” would be permitted on its new meetinghouse in 1788. Bentley notes that this was “not in the style of sentiment of the New England settlers” and concludes somewhat sourly that “the Catholic Church” (as he put it) had always existed in human nature.¹ Alternately, a cipher for In Hoc Signo or Jesus Hominum Salvator, the emblem was rarely used by Protestant churches in America. A parallel can be found in a blue-and-white earthenware plate used in the Communion service of the congregation in Concord , Massachusetts. Made in Lambeth, England, between about 1690 and 1711, the plate has religious symbols fired into its center including an upright cross, the letters “I.H.S.”, and what appear to be three nails. It has come down with a history of use in Concord’s First Parish, but there is no indication when it was introduced into the service.² That these painted religious or semi-religious maxims were authorized by the community at large is suggested by a vote taken in Brimfield, Massachusetts, shortly after that community completed its 1805 meetinghouse. Pleased with the success of its native son Elias Carter, the town meeting voted to ask a sign painter to inscribe on the pulpit canopy, “My father’s house shall be called a house of prayer for all people”—a paraphrase of Isaiah 56:7. The same informant who reported this vote remembered (and fortunately preserved) the “silk hangings” suspended behind it.³ A more visual symbol of the Christian deity was reported by Alice Morse Earle, who writes: “The pulpit of one old, unpainted church retained until the middle of this century [nineteenth] as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrongdoers of the great, all-seeing eye of God.”⁴ The Divine eye as an emblem of God was a popular image among Protestants in the second half of the eighteenth century and an important symbol in Freemasonry, established in the colonies by the 1730s. A 1760 children’s broadside...