Emblems for Royal Crown Lodge No. 22

Artist unknown · 1810–15

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

63.5 × 80.7 cm (25 × 31 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Emblems for Royal Crown Lodge No. 22 is a rare surviving example of early nineteenth-century Masonic ceremonial art, its panel surface dense with the symbolic vocabulary of Freemasonry rendered with careful, almost devotional precision. Painted by an unknown hand between 1810 and 1815, the work belongs to a tradition of lodge emblem pictures commissioned across Britain and North America as visual statements of fraternal identity. Anonymous craftsmen and decorative painters — rather than academically trained artists — typically carried out these commissions, bringing a straightforward clarity to the layered symbolism that academic convention might have obscured. The oil-on-panel support, chosen over canvas, lends the image a solidity and intimacy appropriate to an object meant for lodge display rather than domestic walls. Works of this kind were rarely signed, and the identity of the painter behind Royal Crown Lodge No. 22 remains unknown — a fate shared by the majority of Masonic emblem paintings from the period, most of which have since been lost or dispersed from their original lodge settings. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the original, making this one of the few examples of its type preserved in a major public collection. A hand-painted oil reproduction captures the deliberate, symbol-by-symbol construction of the original — the careful brushwork, the muted tonal range, and the quiet authority that makes the painting more than mere decoration.