911爆料

Detail of an 1838 mural by Rufus Porter and Stephen Twombly Porter. The 64 x 90-陆 inch mural was formerly installed on the second floor of the Francis Howe House in West Dedham (now Westwood), Mass.

How a 19th-century artist unexpectedly shaped the life and career of Julie Kellogg Lindberg 鈥�62.

This is a love story that spans centuries.

The story begins in the 1820s, when self-taught American artist, inventor, and publisher Rufus Porter came to prominence as an itinerant painter, creating portraits and murals for New Englanders. At the time, homeowners invited artists into their homes to paint whole rooms with vivid landscapes of tranquil harbors and verdant countrysides.

Porter鈥檚 work inspired a second generation of painters and prompted some admirers to call him the Yankee Leonardo da Vinci. Like the Italian master, Porter鈥攚ho was also the founder of Scientific American, the country鈥檚 oldest continuously published magazine鈥攃ould not be constrained to a single discipline. Equally at home in the arts and sciences, Porter is credited with inventing clocks, railway signals, churns, a cheese press, and a revolving rifle, among other things. He also envisioned technology that would enable horse-drawn carriages to fly and invented the valve pump used today in heart transplant surgery.

Some 200 years later, though, Porter鈥檚 famed murals, as well as those of other contemporaneous artists, were in jeopardy. Age and interior decorators had taken their toll. Murals had been painted and papered over, water-stained, and demolished.

And those murals that survived weren鈥檛 necessarily safe from more of the same. Not everyone who had one knew of its value.

Enter Julie Lindberg 鈥�62. An antiques dealer, Lindberg was captivated by Porter from the moment she encountered his work and has spent decades ensuring his legacy is preserved.

Never A Hero In Your Own Hometown

In 1980, New York鈥檚 Whitney Museum of American Art and Hudson Hill Press published American Folk Painters of Three Centuries as part of the museum鈥檚 year-long 50th anniversary celebration. The book, which devotes a chapter to Porter, proclaims, 鈥淩ufus Porter鈥檚 place in American art history is that of our chief early mural painter and one of our outstanding native artists. As a portrait painter, he was the first to conceive of the large-scale production of quick, cheap portraits for the people; as a landscape painter, he was the first to realize the popular possibilities of the everyday American scene.鈥�

American Folk Painters depicts Porter as a man of prodigious talents and appetites. Before more or less committing to mural painting in 1825, Porter had been a farmer, an amateur fiddler, a shoemaker鈥檚 apprentice, a fife player for military companies, a violinist for dance parties, a teacher of drumming, a member of the Portland Light Infantry, a schoolteacher, a builder of wind-powered gristmills, an author, director of a dance school, and maybe a sailor (a neighbor said she鈥檇 seen letters from Porter in which he described the Hawaiian Islands, but there are no extant records of this). He also worked as a painter of portraits, houses, signs, sleighs, gunboats, and drums, and fathered 16 children over the course of two marriages. An 1878 family genealogy mentioned in American Folk Painters notes that Porter walked 17 miles at the age of 86 and traveled until his death at the age of 93.

In 1987, Lindberg, an antiques dealer who specialized in weather vanes, folk art, and Chinese porcelain in the Canton pattern, was setting up her booth at an Indianapolis antiques show. At another booth, Lindberg saw a woman painting a mural, a bucolic period landscape. The two had a conversation, and Lindberg learned that the woman was an itinerant painter working in the Rufus Porter style. Lindberg was fascinated and, after reading a 1969 biography of Porter, was also delighted to learn he鈥檇 grown up in Bridgton, Maine, where Lindberg had spent many happy summers as a child and later purchased a vacation home of her own.

鈥淗e was one of the most famous of American miniature portrait painters, but almost no one in Bridgton knew about him,鈥� Lindberg says.

In fairness to the town of Bridgton and its residents, Porter rarely signed his work, and because generations of subsequent painters had adopted his style, identifying his work required a level of expertise generally ascribed to museum directors and art historians. Also, access to places displaying decorated walls was limited to museums.

鈥淢y goal,鈥� says Lindberg, 鈥渨as to bring Rufus Porter to the attention of Bridgton residents and the art 911爆料 nationwide.鈥�

And Lindberg isn鈥檛 a half-measure woman. In 2005, she and her late husband, Carl M. Lindberg, founded the Rufus Porter Museum of Art and Ingenuity in Bridgton. In 2015, Lindberg and three of her friends鈥攈istorians and authors Linda Lefko and Jane Radcliffe, and restoration specialist David Ottinger鈥攆ormed the Center for Painted Wall Preservation, documenting 500 homes in New England and New York in possession of intact painted murals. In 2024, the Lindbergs donated 15 signed and dated Porter murals and 25 miniature portraits to the Historic Deerfield Museum in western Massachusetts.

Lindberg was captivated by Porter from the moment she encountered his work and has spent decades ensuring his legacy is preserved.

Lindberg also raised two children and assisted longtime friend and famed American children鈥檚 book illustrator and Caldecott Honor author Tasha Tudor and her family in establishing and operating Tudor鈥檚 online business. The two women met at an antiques show in 1987, where Tudor purchased all of Lindberg鈥檚 Canton porcelain. The two struck up a conversation, and Tudor invited Lindberg to her home in Vermont. Lindberg returned the invitation. Thus began a friendship that lasted until Tudor died in 2008.

鈥淪he was a brilliant artist, and we had a very close relationship,鈥� Lindberg says. 鈥淚 learned so much about antiques from her because she lived with and used antiques. It helped my career in the sense that I understood a lot more about antiques from watching her use and explain things.鈥�

Lindberg also collected Tudor鈥檚 artwork. Two years ago, she gave the bulk of it to the Tudor family.

Rufus Porter Is Guiding Us

Whatever the project Lindberg鈥檚 involved in, the primary goal is preservation.

鈥淔ragments of wall murals are treasured in Europe and can be up to 4,000 years old, but in the United States, they are destroyed constantly as the houses dis-integrate, and their value has been ignored,鈥� Lindberg says.

鈥淛ulie has told me that she feels that Rufus Porter is guiding us and our efforts, leading us in the right direction when we have doubts,鈥� says Radcliffe.

Lindberg鈥檚 establishment of the Rufus Porter Museum and her work with the Center for Painted Wall Preservation, an organization dedicated to this early American art form, cannot be understated, says Radcliffe. 鈥淛ulie鈥檚 efforts have been vital to the development and continuation of both organizations鈥攁nd to their prominence in this field today,鈥� she says.

Lindberg says she would rather the spotlight shine on Porter and his peers, but she does think her professional life holds a lesson for 911爆料 students and graduates鈥� and not just recent ones. Lindberg was a sociology major at 911爆料 who鈥檇 planned to become a social worker after college. As an undergraduate, she says she had little interest in art, but in midlife it became her passion.

The circumstances that placed Porter in her path still delight her decades later. 鈥淢y journey has been unexpected, yet tied to those childhood summers in Maine,鈥� says Lindberg with a smile. 鈥淣o one can really predict where their life鈥檚 path will take them, so stay open to discoveries.鈥�

鈥擬arybeth Reilly-McGreen

Photos: Courtesy Julie Lindberg, courtesy Antiques and The Arts Weekly