A Yankee Da Vinci

The headline read FEW PRESENT. In three terse sentences, the obituary in the New Haven Evening Register of Aug. 14, 1884, informed readers that the aged inventor Rufus Porter was dead, and that "there were very few present at the service." It was a cruel epitaph for a man who had lived 92 years and responded so creatively to an inventive age. Porter was the creator of more than 100 machines and gadgets including a washing machine, an airship, a portable, prefabricated house, an automobile run on steam, and an elevated train. He was the founder of the Scientific American, which has just reached its 125th year.

Though the fact was not discovered until some 60 years after his death, Porter was also a brilliant primitive painter who decorated the walls of countless New England homes with wild landscape murals. But he was far from a traditional example of neglected genius. In many ways, Porter was the most active collaborator in his own oblivion. He never settled anywhere for long; he failed to patent most of his inventions. Above all, he left most of his hundreds of portraits and murals unsigned.

Fifteen-Minute Portrait. Porter was born in 1792, while Washington was still in office. He grew up in Maine, went to school for six months when he was twelve, and then turned his back on his family's prosperous farm. In 1807 he set out for Portland carrying a fife and a fiddle. Within eight years he was making money as a traveling musician, a teacher, a sign and house painter, a soldier, a builder. With typical Yankee ingenuity, Porter tried each occupation from as many angles as possible. Once he mastered a skill, he proceeded immediately to teach it and then to write an instruction book about it.

In 1815 Porter married a Portland girl named Eunice Twombly. Family life was not for him, and he soon took to the road again, bound for New Haven. If Eunice objected, she never made an issue of it. He went home to Portland periodically over the years--often enough, at least, to produce ten children in 18 years.

For the next eight years, portrait painting absorbed most of Porter's energies. Attacking portraiture with his customary canny vigor, Porter tried to speed up the normally tedious process and devised a simply constructed portable camera obscura. By projecting the subject's facial outline onto paper, Porter could, in 15 minutes, trace a likeness, fill in the features, and collect.

Around 1824, Porter turned to mural painting. For him, painting was not art but craft, and his murals were the common man's answer to the costly, imported French wallpapers that adorned fashionable American homes. Characteristically, Porter shared the secret of his paint-mixing techniques with the public by publishing instructions and recipe booklets: "Dissolve half a pound of glue in a gallon of water, and with this sizing mix whatever colors may be required for the work." Foliage could be stippled on with corks and sponges; bark was suggested by "giving a tremulous motion to the brush."

Rustic Trompe I'Oeil. The results of this technique, at least when Porter was painting, were fresh and simple, but they were marked with the authoritative vision of a minor master. With great tact, Porter blended Hawaiian volcanoes and exotic foliage with views of neat New England farms and valleys. The murals he painted in 1838 for Dr. Francis Howe in Westwood, Mass., are typical. Simple devices create perspective: the arc of a hill, an angled fence, the diminishing height of trees. The viewer feels that he has actually stepped into the landscape. Porter's murals customarily covered every square inch of the wall with a rustic version of trompe 1'oeil that prefigures William Harnett and John Peto. Doorways were incorporated into his overall composition by foliage or puffs of volcanic smoke painted around them. Wood graining and knots were repeated in the horizontals of tree limbs and clusters of figures.

Porter painted more than 150 houses in more than 75 New England towns during his 20 years as a muralist and, as in the case of his portraits, rarely signed his work. One day in 1940, Jean Lipman, editor of Art in America, noticed Porter's signature and date on a mural. She followed up the clue, studied his style, slowly identified his other works, and eventually pieced his lifetime together in her book, Rufus Porter, Yankee Pioneer.

Much of what she found concerned Porter's interest in new-fangled machines. Trudging behind his portable studio as a young man, he had conceived of an airship with the possibility of freeing Napoleon from St. Helena. Most of his notions were more down to earth. With typical inventor's zeal, he sought to devise easy solutions to practical problems. When he saw his wife laboring over the scrub board, he invented a washing machine. In 1846 he published plans for a Broadway elevated railroad, preceding by two decades the first el.

Crackpot and Eccentric. By the 1840s, Porter's urge to paint was waning, and journalism caught his grasshopperish interest. In 1845, while working as an electroplater in New York, he launched the Scientific American, mainly to have a showcase for his ideas. He served as editor, wrote most of the early articles, and liberally sprinkled the magazine with the Rube Goldberg-esque diagrams that he made for his machines. But within a year of its founding, he sold it. He had an idea for a rifle with a revolving chamber and foolishly sold it to Samuel Colt of Hartford for $100. In 1849, Porter tried to promote his old St. Helena airship as a safe way to fly gold rushers to California in three days. The years passed. No one would listen; he was ahead of his time, a crackpot, an eccentric. None of his inventions left a mark, but Porter's portraits and murals remain to testify to the man's extraordinary versatility.

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