Old Fairbanks House, Dedham, Massachusetts

When Childe Hassam painted it around 1884, the Fairbanks House in Dedham, a few miles south-west of Boston, was already close to 250 years old. Jonathan Fairbanks, a Puritan settler from England, built it for his family in the late 1630s, and tree-ring dating of its timbers has since shown that the main beam of the hall came from a tree felled in 1637. That makes it the oldest timber-frame house in North America whose age has been confirmed this way. The Fairbanks family went on living in it for eight generations, into the early 20th century. Hassam painted it in oil on paper, later mounted on canvas, a picture a little over half a metre square. It came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1982 as a bequest of Kate Talbot Hopkins.