The artists Kevin Paulsen and David Wiggin are longtime friends. They met in Nantucket back in the early 1990s, and discovered they were both interested in classical decorative painting as well as historic preservation. Inspired by the surviving horsehair-plaster murals found in early American homes—cracked and weathered—the two have collaborated on a number of monumental pieces, wall “fragments” from great houses that never existed. The imagery is naive, detailed, combed, and patterned; the color-sense is touched with sepia and glowing with greenery; some scenes channel the exotic. Whether you call the fragments paintings or murals, these fantasias, based on historical knowledge, are stunning works of art. —Laura Jacobs