A Nyack, New York Landscape Painted Fireboard, L.S. Moore, 1840

A roof repairer purchased it from a house in Nyack, New York;

Sotheby's, New York, Important Americana, October 23, 1994, sale 6613, lot 371 (showing mantel);

Linda and Michael Whittemore, Punta Gorda, Florida sold at the New Hampshire Antiques Show, 2000.

Remi Spriggs, “Living with antiques: An Americana collection in New Jersey,” Magazine Antiques (April 2005), 94-105;

Leslie and Peter Warwick, Love At First Sight: Discovering Stories About Folk Art & Antiques Collected by Two Generations & Three Families, (New Jersey: 2022), p. 285-6, fig. 473.

L.S.P. Moore, a painter and carpenter, was born in Vermont in 1815 and married Jemimah (Jane) Reser of Minisink, Orange County, New York, approximately 30 miles from Nyack, New York. This fireboard was purchased directly from a home in Nyack, close to the Hudson River, helping to affirm the location of the scene. In the scene, a gentleman with a cane stands near a milepost and directs a traveler who holds a bundle tied to a stick. On the left, a farmer holds a spade and points down the road directing another traveler carrying a bundle in his hand. Behind them, a hunter with a gun on his shoulder walks with his dog next to the dike. Three ducks swim on a pond in front of cultivated fields and a wall separates the cultivated fields from the forest. A tall dike separates the road from the Hudson River where a sloop sails. A large tree and smaller trees and large bushes frame the scene and the rosy dawn sky. Its border has two blue bands of egg and dart stenciling that surround a green band of stenciled flowers and leaves. The contrast between nature’s wild forest and man’s cultivated fields and the man-made dyke controlling the Hudson River is a primitive version of a Hudson River Valley School painting which was in full bloom in the 1840s.