Reason Bell Crafft was an itinerant artist who is best known as a portrait painter. This apron, which he purportedly decorated for Thomas Hine (1801–1882), resembles many printed Masonic charts and aprons, in particular “Masters Carpet,” published as the frontispiece to Jeremy L. Cross’s The True Masonic Chart, or Hieroglyphic Monitor (first published in 1819). The apron is replete with Masonic symbols. The all-seeing eye signifies watchfulness, and the blue-and-black mosaic platform supporting two columns symbolizes the good and evil in life. The letter G refers to God, geometry, or both. The coffin at the bottom serves to remind the wearer of the fleeting nature of life. Additional Masonic symbols include the sun, the moon and seven stars, a square, a sword and the Constitutions (or rules of the fraternity), a trowel, Euclid’s 47th proposition (which teaches Masons to be lovers of the arts and sciences), a gavel and twenty-four-inch gauge, a level, a plumb, a five-point star, a heart, and an open Bible surmounted by a square and compasses.

Thomas Hine was living in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1850, and in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1860 and 1870, putting him within Crafft’s known terrain of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa, and Mississippi.