When No Photos Exist, Paintings Become the Evidence for Restoring Historic Rooms

When the National Park Service needs to refurnish a historic interior, the ideal find is a photograph of the room from the right era. But photography only arrived in the United States in 1839, saw limited use through the 1840s, and rarely captured home interiors until the latter decades of the 19th century. That leaves a long stretch of history where researchers have to work from paintings, prints, written records, and archaeological evidence instead.

The painting A Maid Ladling Soup from a Kettle by Pehr Hilleström offers both obvious and easy-to-miss details about 18th-century kitchen objects. National Park Service.

What a Single Painting Can Tell You

Pehr Hilleström's painting A Maid Ladling Soup from a Kettle is a good example of how much a single image can yield. The obvious details — a large stoneware bowl with a hand-painted floral design, a large carved wooden spoon, and a large copper kettle with a bail handle — are enough on their own to support placing those objects in an 18th-century kitchen at a historic site.

The less obvious details are just as valuable. A careful look at the painting turns up:

• A smaller copper kettle in the fire beside the large one
• An iron cooking trivet
• A mortar and pestle on the fireplace mantle (probably brass, though the material is hard to confirm from the image)
• A tall redware jar without a lid on the mantle
• A coffee grinder on the mantle
• Another cooking vessel hanging on the wall to the right of the fireplace, its material unclear because it sits in a dimly lit corner
• A push broom with a long, turned wood handle leaning against an adjacent wall
• A metal pot lying on its side in the lower left corner, probably copper like the others
• A very large redware pot with handles standing behind it, approximately the height of the subject's thigh
• Firewood stored in a space beneath the fireplace

One Painting Isn't Enough

Spotting an object in one painting doesn't automatically justify putting it in a restored room. Researchers need to confirm that the object wasn't unusual for its time — that it reflected common practice rather than a rare exception. That means finding other depictions of kitchens or cooking spaces from the same period.

John Atkinson's Kitchen Scene, painted in 1771, provides that kind of cross-check. It shows two large pots — one copper with a large bail handle — along with several pieces of redware and stoneware and a large spoon, all of which line up with what Hilleström painted.

Details from Kitchen Scene, 1771 by John Atkinson confirm objects seen in the Hilleström painting and introduce additional common kitchen items. National Park Service.

The Atkinson painting also introduces objects not seen in Hilleström's work: baskets, a large redware pitcher, hanging metal hooks, glass bottles, a bench, a table, a chair with black leather upholstery, and two pieces of cooperage. Each of those additions can then be tested against still more contemporary images to see how widely they appear.

Building a Well-Informed Conjecture

No amount of research can produce complete certainty about what filled a room at a specific moment in the past. What careful use of contemporary artwork can produce is a well-informed conjecture — one grounded in multiple sources rather than guesswork. When photographs don't exist, researchers who look creatively at paintings and prints, and who cross-reference what they find, end up with a far stronger furnishings plan than those working from thin evidence.

Sources

This article is based on "Using Artwork in Historic Furnishings Research," published by the National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain.