About the collection

John W.M. Chamberlain was born in the summer of 1834. He grew up in the Spring Garden and Middle districts of Philadelphia, where his father, Charles, worked as a carpenter. John’s mother, Sarah, was the daughter of a Philadelphia grocer. We know little of his childhood, but by 1850, John had started work as a paperhanger — a tradesman who puts up wallpaper.

Spring Garden, when John Chamberlain was growing up, was itself a large and busy district of growing Philadelphia. And it was a mere half-hour walk, especially for an energetic teenager, from the downtown core of the city, with its cosmopolitan mix of theatres, dance halls, and galleries.

Did Chamberlain see the famous Shakespearean actor Edward Eddy perform? It’s possible. He could also have witnessed M. Godard’s grand balloon ascension from the lumberyard on Chestnut Street. He’d have been a teenager when the notorious dancer-courtesan Lola Montez was making her much-publicized North American tours, and he could hardly have missed hearing about her. Minstrel shows, circuses, slapstick comedies, the naughtier illustrated magazines of the time—these would have been constantly available, posters for the performers festooning the city streets.

Sometime in the late 1850s, when John was in his early 20s, the whole family moved to Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, to care for John’s ailing grandmother, Catharine. John — unmarried, still living at home, and still working as a paperhanger — must have found small, provincial Selinsgrove to be lacking in stimulation compared to the bustling metropolis of his adolescence. This seems to be around the time when John starts making his art, recording a vibrant mix of memory and fantasy in ink and watercolor illustrations, all on the backs wallpaper scraps he could salvage from work. It depicts a whimsical, larger-than-life world of suffragettes and minstrel shows, slack-wire walkers, hot-air balloonists and bare-knuckle prizefighters. And above all, curvaceous young women exposing (for the time) a lot of leg. He signed them “J.W.M. Chamberlain, Practical Paperhanger.”

The artworks continue through the 1870s — and then J.W.M. Chamberlain vanishes. The last we know is that he and his sister Catharine were living together in Selinsgrove in 1880, when he was 39 and she was 42. There are no further records of him in the census, and not even a death certificate. All we have is his art and the vanished, half-imagined world it depicts.

My grandmother purchased these artworks sometime around YEARTKTKTK. What provenance we have is a single line of text, saying she purchased them “from the artist’s daughter, but she would only take as much as she thought her father could afford to pay, in case he ever came back to town and wanted them.” This is the only indication we have that Chamberlain may have had a family.

For many years the collection languished in an unheated attic in TKTKTK, Pennsylvania. We’re sharing it primarily to introduce people to a rare trove of notable work, by a craftsman and artist of remarkable vision. Secondly, we hope sharing his work may help flush out more information about the man, his family, his life, and his art. If you can add a piece to this puzzle, we’d love it if you’d get in touch.