Versatile Yankee: The Art of Jonathan Fisher, 1768-1847

Pyne Press [Published date: 1973].. Hard cover, 29 pp, followed by (unpaginated), 40 color plates on one side with description of plate and b&w illustrations on opposite page. [Excerpt from jacket flap] "At the age of fifty-six the Reverend Jonathan Fisher sat before a looking glass in his house in Blue Hill, Maine, and painted a picture of himself. It shows him keen-eyed, wrinkled, and intense, seated at a table with an open copy of the Bible in Hebrew." So Alice Winchester introduces us to an uncommon common man, the nineteenth century pastor of a little Maine town. More than his occupation or the locale might suggest. Fisher was a universal man-inventor, farmer, architect and builder, surveyor, linguist, naturalist. Above all he was an artist, translating his vision of the goodness and orderliness of God's creation into paintings and woodcuts. Made for his own enjoyment and that of his family and a few friends, Fisher's paintings have largely been preserved in the small community where he lived and worked for over forty years. This book, while it reveals Fisher's many-sided personality, is basically devoted to illustrating his work. The majority of his paintings are published here for the first time -the water colors from his notebooks, begun when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, and lovingly bound with his own hands; a selection of his most important paintings in oil; and many of the woodcuts with which he illustrated his books. Here, carefully recorded, with straightforward and painstaking realism, are Fisher's college and his village, the fruits of his garden, and the animals and birds of field and forest.