Haunted House

Morris Kantor drew inspiration from the material culture of historical New England—ladder-back chairs, colonial portraiture, marine painting, wallpaper—in this fantastical rendering of a supposedly haunted house in rural Massachusetts. A shadowy figure lurks at the composition’s darkened right edge, an unknown presence encroaching on the comforts of the sitting room. Kantor later recalled that such a setting, with “its peculiar moldy smell, the fading beauty of old plaster discolored by time and living . . . turned my imagination to the past, to the people who had lived there and gone.” A Russian immigrant, the artist engaged with the stories and objects of American history as catalysts for his Surrealist, dreamlike musings.