Image courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
This painting dates to around the time the house was built: 1858. Over time, its surface has cracked, making the sky look like a piece of crazed antique porcelain. Peer closely, and you’ll see two benches facing in separate directions. In the one on the left is a man in a top hat, his arms in the air; on the other sits a lady with hair piled high on her head, staring off into space. It is difficult to discern what they are up to—at first it looks like he is reading a book or newspaper to her. Stare harder, and their opposite-facing directions suggest an argument. Clearly the artist’s calling was as a landscape painter—the house, trees, and lawn look realistic, but the people, and the grazing horse, are rendered in an almost childlike hand. The lady is likely Armentine Julia Papin, born in St. Louis in 1838. Her fur trapper father, Pierre Papin, died in the wilderness; his grave is a cedar post, marked with a metal tag, that still stands near Fort John in Nebraska. Julie, as she was known, married Henry Thompson Norcom in December 1858 and settled in what’s now O’Fallon Park.
The way the landscape dwarfs the tiny human figures was probably not far from how the couple felt living on land that was barely out of the wilderness, despite the fact they would eventually re-enter the mansion behind them. There’s also something about this image—the green-gray color, or the romantic feel of it—that makes you wish it were also the cover of a book and that inside was the story of Julie and Henry, written by a Jane Austen of the American frontier.
