”Nothing To Do“
24 X 30 Oil
To walk the streets of restored Nauvoo
is to visit fine brick and frame homes and businesses, neat gardens, and tidy sidewalks.
In fact, the majority of the homes and structures built in Nauvoo were of necessity
generally crude and quickly built, though clean and serviceable.
Nauvoo was on the edge of the frontier after all, and even though Nauvoo rivaled
Chicago in size, log homes would have been common and accepted.
One newspaper reported that at its peak Nauvoo had twelve hundred log cabins, many
white-washed. This was almost twice the number of brick
and frame homes combined.
Nothing to Do visits a young boy listlessly gazing out of the door of his hand-hewn
log home on a hot summer day. School is out, chores are finished,
but the heat of the day requires some consideration as to the best way to profit
from his free time.
For this painting David “borrowed” his log cabin from This is the Place State Park
choosing a bright summer day to study the effect of light and shadow.
He selected his son Thomas, and a neighbor’s dog as models.
Private Collection