Fireboard
Open-knowledge reference entry
A fireboard or chimney board is a panel designed to cover a fireplace during the warm months of the year. It was "commonly used during the later 18th and early 19th centuries" in places like France and New England.
Overview
In warm weather, "a fireboard effectively reduced the number of mosquitoes and other insects, or even birds, that might enter a house through an open, damperless chimney." The "board or shutterlike contrivance" typically "of wood or cast of sheet metal" is "frequently decorated with painting and stencilling." Some fireboards have notches cut out of the lowest edge to accommodate andirons. Fireboards are also called: chimney boards, chimney pieces, chimney stops, fire boards, summer boards.
Production
Among the many artists who have produced ornamental fireboards: Robert Adam; Winthrop Chandler (1747–1790); Andien de Clermont; Charles Codman; Michele Felice Cornè; Edward Hicks; Jean-Baptiste Oudry; Rufus Porter. Examples of decorated fireboards are in numerous collections, including: Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts; Historic New England; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA; Peabody Essex Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum.
Gallery
References
Further reading
"Ornamental Chimney Boards". Cassell's Household Guide. Vol. 2.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5451738. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1747 and 1790.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fireboard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.