In April 1955, the growing Schulz family moved within Minneapolis, Minnesota, to a larger home, located on West Minnehaha Parkway. They lived here until June 1958, when they relocated to Sonoma County. Like in the family’s previous home in Colorado Springs, Charles M. Schulz created wall murals for his children, featuring early versions of his characters (Running Snoopy, seen here, and Monte, view here). This running Snoopy, behaves more like a real dog, as he was inclined to do in the earliest years of Peanuts. The Colorado Springs nursery wall mural is also preserved and exhibited in this gallery.

In 2014, the murals were carefully removed from the house, including the plaster and lathe wall structure, making removal, transport, and display challenging. Both murals were then cleaned and stabilized by a conservator in preparation for their display. Unlike the Colorado Springs mural, which was painted in durable oil paints, these were completed with poster paints, perhaps readily at hand with a house full of kids, a much more fragile medium. Careful examination reveals a rough preliminary sketch in pencil, much as Schulz would do when drawing the Peanuts comic strip.