Plate

This blue and white transfer-printed earthenware plate made by the Staffordshire firm of Joseph Stubbs features a view of the Nahant Hotel on the Nahant peninsula near Boston, Massachusetts. A steamboat of the kind that made daily trips between Boston and Nahant is pictured in the distance. The coach to the left of the hotel is also typical of the period. The Nahant Hotel was built of stone from 1820 to 1823 by Boston merchant-philanthropist Thomas Handasyd Perkins (1764–1854) who sought to capitalize on Nahant's picturesque and reputedly therapeutic ocean setting. Complete with seventy guest rooms, wooden verandas, billiard room, bowling alley, ballroom and bathing house, the Nahant Hotel was among the most impressive lodgings of its day. After two significant enlargements in 1831 and 1852 it burned in 1861. Like mountain resorts and inland spas of the period, seaside resorts met the increasing need of newly affluent Americans to fill their leisure time with amusing and healthy outdoor activities. Seaside resorts were slowly growing in popularity as medical authorities began to lay claim to the restorative powers of ocean breezes and waters. Stubbs' view of the Nahant Hotel was based on an 1823 drawing by Boston artist John Ritto Penniman (1783–1830) engraved by Annin & Smith and published as "Nahant Hotel" in Caleb Snow’s "A History of Boston" (Boston, 1825). Stubbs included the view in its series of approximately seventeen architectural and scenic American views surrounded by a standard border of spread eagles, flowers and scrolls, which it produced for the United States export market. Representing economic prosperity and new uses of architecture, hotels were often depicted on transfer-printed export wares.