It took a while but spring has finally come to Old Lyme.
Do not miss an opportunity to visit the grounds of the Museum during the heady days of “First Greens”.Myriad daffodils abound on the grounds; in particular just north of the Florence Griswold House.
As you drive in through the main entrance to the Museum, don’t miss the beautiful old cherry tree on the left just past the tulip tree. It possesses such a sublime essence of pale pink beauty. It has only a few days of glory before it sheds its petals.
The trees and shrubberies are coming into their own.We are well into the first blush of spring and the Pepperidge and Willow are harbingers of the early leafing of our Maples, Beeches, Oaks and Dogwoods.
The historical garden and Huntley Brown gardens are also displaying the first flowering of April and May flowers. The first tulip was seen yesterday.Lilacs are just around the corner.
Come quick, come soon; spring is too quickly a fleeting memory of loveliness and aromatic smells.
The Museum's recent acquisition The Broken Wall, a snowy landscape by Wilson Irvine, will soon be leaving the galleries, replaced by the spring scenes of our upcoming exhibition In Bloom. Before this painted snow melts away, let's take a closer look at one tiny section of the canvas depicting a snow-covered shrub at the base of an evergreen tree.
Though we often think of Impressionists as midsummer sun-seekers, the impression of a winter landscape was perhaps even more challenging to capture, with the sun glaring off a snow-covered scene. Courbet's snowy landscapes inspired Monet's early experiments in winterscapes. It's been said many times that the Impressionists banned black from their palettes with painters choosing instead to build their dark shades from colors such as Prussian Blue or mixed complementary colors. But what about "snow white"?
White is definitely in abundance in French and American Impressionist painting, but as Irvine shows us, white is almost never pure. The cool feeling of snow here is accomplished with a heavy dose of violet, lilac, and robin's egg blue. Irvine layers onto this icy base, adding a frosting of warmer white that tends toward a sun-faded pink. While he pushes the cool colors into the canvas, as evidenced by the individual bristle marks, he dabs on this warmer color, letting the paint be pulled from a loaded brush that barely touches the canvas.
Though in this detail The Broken Wall seems wildly painted, Irvine was no Abstract Expressionist. When viewed as a whole (see below), the painting distracts us with it's representational subject matter, concealing the multitude of abstract passages out of which it is created.
A handsome flat stone of Vermont Granite was installed on April 14, 2011 in a newly re-established memorial garden to the north of the Florence Griswold House. The garden honors the legacy of Daniel Woodhead, Jr.Surrounded by thousands of yellow and white daffodils planted by Rob Wilbur of Wilbur and King, the stone is positioned in a stand amongst three maples. Designed by Mary Ann Besier and Ruth Baxter of Rumney and Associates, the slab was ordered, cut, scribed and delivered through the conscientious efforts of Joe Fulton of Shoreline Memorials.
Daniel Woodhead, Jr. (1911-1978), a retired business leader from Winnetka, Illinois whose family had roots in Old Lyme, guided the Florence Griswold Museum as its President from 1974 until 1978.He hired Jeffrey Andersen as director in 1976 and shortly thereafter led the Museum in establishing its first Endowment Fund, which he generously supported.His tenure as President was cut short by his unexpected death on June 18, 1978.Many members admired his leadership and gave funds to establish the Woodhead Memorial Garden on the north side of the Florence Griswold House.Designed by his successor, Dr. George B. Tatum, a distinguished architectural historian, the garden consisted of a rectangular space with a yew hedge that was intended to function as an out-of-door “room” for meetings during the summer.Unfortunately, every winter deer ravaged the hedges and inadequate sunlight meant that they never matured satisfactorily.In the 1990s the hedges were removed and, thanks to the acquisition of additional property between the Museum and the Bee and Thistle Inn, the area was opened up and returned to a more natural state.
Now, many years later, the Museum is re-designating this attractive open space as the Woodhead Memorial Garden. Thousands of daffodils bloom there each spring.This highly visible area brings joy to visitors, residents, and even passers-by that drive by on a daily basis.
One of the great and unique pleasures of museums is the first hand interaction with works of art. There it is, right in front of you. You can read about art, go to lectures, browse collections on the internet, but those experiences never exactly replicate the understanding that comes from seeing for yourself.
When the Google Art Project launched a few months ago, the power of visiting international collections and the ability to "zoom in" to an image created an interesting buzz in art and technology circles. This website seemed to do something others didn't, or didn't do as well. People were impressed.
While the Google Art Project allows you to scan the surface of a painting in great detail. . . well, in fact, so does your eye when you're standing in the gallery. The new technology certainly still has its place, especially in bringing art from international collections right to our desktops. The great thrill of looking up close at any square inch of the canvas you find interesting, however, is available to you in any museum.
Over the next few weeks, I'll post some photos (taken with my phone, no zoom necessary!) of paintings currently in our galleries, like the one here of Willard Metcalf's Kalmia, a depiction of mountain laurel along the Lieutenant River. In this image you can get a sense of areas of thinly applied, dry brushwork (the branches of the laurel) as well as the thick and gooey pinks of the blossoms cooled with lilac shadows. The sheer number of strokes -- of different quality, direction, color, and texture -- that make up this tiny piece of real estate is impressive.
I think you'll be equally impressed with the images to come and the secret details hidden in plain view on the surfaces of the canvases in our galleries. Come and see for yourself.
This post was written by Charles Clark, whose Charles Eaton painting, Evening Quiet, is featured in the current exhibition Connecticut Treasures: Works from Private Collections. The work is a promised bequest to the Museum. We thank him for sharing his thoughts with us!
For the last thirty years I’ve been researching and writing about Connecticut artists who were in their day famous but owing to shifts of taste became, or remain, obscure. Threats to Connecticut’s beautiful countryside drove me first to landscape painters like Charles Warren Eaton, but recently I’ve become interested in contemporary artists like Norman Ives, a graphic designer, painter, and printmaker, who worked with abstracted type forms, and who lived and worked in the New Haven area.
My great-grandparents were patrons of Eaton’s and all my relatives had his paintings and drawings hanging on their walls. This is how I first saw his work. From 1900 to about 1910, Eaton gained fame as the “Pine Tree Painter,” the sole artist to record the white pine forests that were so common across the Northeast at that time. These are the paintings he is best known for today.
When I was a boy, paintings like Evening Quiet, a good example of the pine tree genre, struck me for their mystery, their peacefulness, and their rich glow. They didn’t look like anything else, and as I learned more about Eaton, and wrote about him, I realized we were bound by a love of the New England landscape and an absolute reverence for trees (a critic once commented on the unvarying beauty of Eaton’s trees – whether he painted in Connecticut, or Belgium, or Italy, here was an artist who knew nature and whose landscapes are more than an assembling of natural forms.) That he read Emerson and Thoreau comes as no surprise.
As a little jest, but in truth, sincerely, I once told a friend that after a bad day, as a form of meditation, I’d “take little walks in these paintings.” Art not only amuses and pleases, and shocks, but can edify and even console. Rather than announce “look at me, aren’t I pretty,” paintings like Evening Quiet quietly establish a rapport with the viewer. They are antidotes to this noisy age, evidence that, upon reflection on the timeless beauty of nature, mankind can, with any luck, live a life of modesty.
One of the things I love about being a summer intern here at the Florence Griswold Museum is that my days are often filled with surprises-
everything from noticing something new in a painting thanks to a second grader to planting a cornfield! Only a couple of weeks ago on June eighth, I found myself out behind the Museum's garden helping to plant several hundred Indian corn seeds along with fellow co-workers Ted, Randy and Matt F. But why would an art museum plant a field of corn you may be asking yourself.
No, the museum is not establishing a farm to grow vegetables for Café Flo (Indian corn is purely a decorative variety of corn). Instead, the plantin
g was part of the many preparations that we are making for the exciting Harvestime festival at the museum in October. After the grand success of the Wee Faerie Village, David Rau the director of education and outreach at the museum has developed a similar concept for the museum grounds that will engage the creativity of local artists once again. No crows will dare to touch our precious cornfield thanks to the over two dozen scarecrows created by local artists inspired by famous artists from around the world and though out history which will dot the grounds for the month of October. These scarecrows will come in all shapes, sizes, colors, patterns and designs. On your journey around the grounds you will run into all sorts of characters- anyone from Picasso to Georgia O’Keeffe to Childe Hassam. H
owever, even an incredible scarecrow exhibit such as this is incomplete without a cornfield! And it looks like our field is off to a good start; after only two weeks the corn is already around 11 inches tall and is flourishing because of all of the rain and hot weather we have been having. Please feel free to come by and check on the progress of our cornfield throughout the summer when you come to visit the museum. The field is now nicely marked with a sign featuring Van Scarecrow, our very own scarecrow mascot. (Here my fellow intern Ian is posing with the newly installed sign.)
The cornfield will be featured in one of the exciting activities planned for the scarecrow exhibition; guests will be able to pose in scarecrow costumes in front of the hopefully very tall cornfield (the plants are supposed to get to 8 feet by the end of the summer). The museum will be hosting lots of other special events including Not-So-Very-Scary Nighttime tours of the scarecrows as well as pumpkin carving and scavenger hunts. In the meantime, I will be reporting every once and a while about how our corn is shaping up. Stay tuned for the next step- thinning the corn. At this point, it looks like the corn might be knee high by the fourth of July!
(Below is an updated photo of the corn taken on June 24th)
Red Bartlett Pear Tree planted in honor of Betty Chamberlain
Elizabeth (Betty) C. Chamberlain, of Old Lyme, is a longtime friend and trustee of the Florence Griswold Museum. To honor her years of service and devotion to the Museum, the Buildings & Grounds Committee proposed, back in January, to plant an ornamental tree in her honor.
It was agreed that an espalier ornamental fruit tree (Red Bartlett Pear – pyrus communis) would be planted on the west side of the Rafal Landscape Center.Everyone felt a pear tree would be a welcome addition to the museum grounds. Sheila Werthiemer, our Garden Historian and leader of the volunteer “Garden Gang,” observed that, although there is no record of an espalier tree being planted on the old estate’s grounds, they were being cultivated in America during the Lyme Art Colony days, certainly by 1910.
“Espalier” refers to the horticultural practice of training trees through pruning and grafting in order to create a formal "flat plane “ or menorah candlestick branch pattern. Espalier trees usually grow against a wall, fence, or trellis. The technique was used in Medieval Europe to produce fruit inside a fortress courtyard where open space was at a premium. It eventually was seen as a means of decorating courts and garden walls. In the 17th Century the word espalier described the trellis or frame on which a plant was trained to grow.
Sheila selected the pear tree from a local nursery and planted it on April 23, 2010. In addition, we also decided to plant a number of low blueberry bushes to flank the tree. Suitable signage was installed to identify the tree and why it was planted.
Please look for this tree on your next visit to the Florence Griswold Museum.
Located on an 11-acre site in the historic village of Old Lyme, the Florence Griswold Museum is known as the Home of American Impressionism. In addition to the restored Griswold House, where the artists of the Lyme Art Colony lived, the Museum features a riverfront art gallery with changing exhibitions, education center, extensive gardens, and artist’s studio.
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