Otis House

The Template Parlor

Image of a parlor with a red sofa on the left and a small, elaborate yellow-tiled fireplace to the right on an angled wall. The fireplace opening is circular, and the mantel is supported by elaborately-carved wooden columns. The walls are hung with photographs and paintings.

A Template Gathering Space

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Making a Template Visible

Template and the Template Project

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Template Dumbwaiter

A dumbwaiter was included in the china closet so that food could easily be sent from the kitchen upstairs to the night nursery where the three Eustis children took many of their meals.

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Historic Paint Cross Section

Template Uncovering the Original Paint

In order to discover the original paint of the hall, a deep chip was removed from the wall and its cross section examined through a microscope, revealing each layer of paint. In this cross section from the hall, four individual layers of red paint were used to create the original wall treatment, followed by a single layer of modern white paint. The four original paint layers contained hand-ground pigments of various sizes, creating a depth in the color that was more like canvas painting than modern wall painting. As part of the restoration of the Eustis mansion, Historic New England hired specialized decorative painters to recreate the four layers of red in the hallway, restoring it to the original Pompeiian red.

Base layer of red paint.

Second layer of red paint.

Third layer of red paint.

Top layer of red varnish.

Modern white latex paint, now painted over.

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Detail of Wood

Template Small Parlor Classical Print

In the nineteenth century famous paintings were often copied as prints and circulated to a mass audience. This is a lithograph after the British artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting completed in 1885 and now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Alma-Tameda’s career spanned more than sixty years during which he focused almost exclusively on classical scenes like this one, imagining the people and their surroundings in minute detail. It’s the attention to detail that appealed to proponents of the Aesthetic Movement who were deeply concerned with the artfulness of day-to-day objects.