Fred Swanton's 1886 Art Work At The Fly

Home

A significant example of late Middle Tennessee Victorian decorative interior painting is found on the ceiling of the Shelbyville-Bedford County History Museum. The artist, Fred Swanton was a young man from Buffalo, New York, who painted scenery and wagons for circuses before he left that state to start a new life as an interior painter. It is known that Mr. Swanton painted rooms in three different homes in this region, from 1886 until his death in the Bedford County Jail in 1888.     In 1881, Peyton S. Dean inherited a family farm near Flat Creek in Bedford County. In 1885, he conveyed portions of this land to his daughter, Elizabeth Dean (1862 -1959), and her husband, Walter Crigler. They began at once to build a house which was finished by 1886. They commissioned Swanton to paint the ceiling, cornices, mantels, fire screens, wainscoting, doors facings in their entrance hall, bedroom, and parlor.     Initially, Swanton's interiors paintings were identified as "primitive folk art painting." But clearly, his work belongs to the "plain painting" tradition of the nineteenth century. In 1997, one room of the Swanton art work was donated to the Bedford County Arts Council by Claude and Cynthia Young to be disassembled and reassembled in the Fly Culture Art Center Museum in downtown Shelbyville. The ceiling, cornice, mantel, fire screen, marbleized wainscoting, door and the door facing were removed from the house and transferred to the Fly Building where it was later reassembled in the Fly Culture Art Center Building. The house was razed in 1998, the same year that the art was re-mounted in the Shelbyville-Bedford County History Museum.     "The room possesses four different free-hand landscapes in each of the four corners of the ceiling, two separate landscapes in the cornice, a painting in the center of the mantel and a painted fire screen, which was unfortunately damaged when the owner cut a pipe hole through the painting to add a gas heater. The ceiling painting depicts four different landscape scenes, featuring mountains and forests. The mantel painting is a lake surrounded by trees, while the fire screen is another forest scene. The cornice work however, departs significantly from Swanton's other work. Here he painted a fantasy-like castle, setting on a island, surrounded by a lake that contains two boats and a bridge. Another cornice landscape is of a tree-covered island in the middle of a lake."     "The cornice is truly remarkable. Swanton first free-hand painted a repetitive design of flowers to define the very top of the wall. To connect this to the ceiling, he designed and built a wood cut-out on which the cornice design was repeated, with four landscapes placed in each of the four corners. From the corners Swanton painted a white band to the painted medallion in the center of the ceiling. Between each band of white, he painted the ceiling a lavender color.... What makes the room so unique are the landscapes in the ceiling corners and in the cornice together with the very fact that Swanton painstakingly painted the ceiling rather than normally recommended use of wallpapers."     The Swanton Art Work, dated 1886, is located in the Fly Cultural Arts Building at 204 South Main Street in Shelbyville, Tennessee 37160 Source: Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Vol. LIII, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp 56-63, Carroll Van West.

Back to Museum