08/28/2026
A Peter Hunt paint decorated chest of drawers. Featuring Hunt’s iconic whimsical hearts and a choir instrumental group, above which is the Proverb “Quien canta, sus males espanta” — “He who sings drives away his sorrows.”
Painted in Hunt’s vibrant period of the 1940’s showing a strong sense of whimsy.
Peter Hunt (1896-1967) was an American folk artist, furniture decorator, located on Cape Cod Ma. Best known for his brilliantly painted, whimsical furniture created in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Born Frederick Lowe Schnitzer in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1896, he served as an ambulance driver in Europe during World War I, where he encountered the Italian, French, Spanish, and other European folk traditions that would profoundly influence his decorative vocabulary. He later adopted the surname Hunt.
Hunt settled in Provincetown in the early 1920s and initially operated an antiques business. In the late 1920s he began transforming ordinary and second-hand furniture with exuberant hand-painted decoration. His compositions incorporated hearts, flowers, birds, animals, human figures, musical motifs, folk sayings, and European peasant imagery, executed in vivid colors with deliberately naïve, vigorous brushwork. He called his approach “transformagic.”
During the 1930s and 1940s, Hunt’s reputation grew rapidly among wealthy clients in New York, Boston, and Cape Cod. He established Peter Hunt’s Peasant Village in Provincetown, a collection of workshops and shops producing painted furniture and other handicrafts. Hunt employed numerous apprentices and decorators, helping to spread his distinctive decorative style throughout the country.
Hunt continued working in Provincetown until his death in 1967. Today his painted furniture is regarded as an important expression of 20th-century American folk and decorative art, and examples are preserved in institutional collections including the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
