Dreaming of Venice

Nineteenth-century folk artists from rural communities often had lives that were circumscribed by the limits of transportation and the family and community ties that kept them close to home. This was especially true of young women. The one exception to this rule may have been when or if the young lady was sent to a finishing school in a town or city. We have a terrific collection of watercolors and needlework pictures in the Fenimore Art Museum from female academies in New England and New York. Looking at these works, I always marvel at the expansive world view of the young artists, as well as the freshness and creativity of the design.

This mid-19th-century watercolor of Venice is one of my favorites. It is about 14” x 19”, and was one of the masterpieces found in the barn on the property of Mr. and Mrs. William J. Gunn in Newtonville, Massachusetts in the 1950s (see my previous post on this collection). The artist, who remains unknown, probably worked from a print source, most likely an engraving in a travel guide that her instructor made available to her in watercolor class. Her reworking of the design is remarkable. Comparing the watercolor to some engravings of the same scene shows how she sharpened the image into a bold, linear composition, and added coloration that emphasized the patterns of the geometric shapes in the exotic architecture of the city. The famous Rialto Bridge dominates the scene, of course, and is executed with a striking angularity that plays nicely off the rounded arch of its underside.

All in all, a picture that evokes a far off place in a time when only the wealthy could think about traveling there. The artist, however, left us one clue to her New England origins: the costumes of the figures in the painting are distinctly local. Why bother recreating such a marvelous destination without placing a part of yourself in it?

Troubled Valentines

I admit that I’ve been a very bad blogger this week, owing mainly to the pressing deadline for the publication of the exhibition catalogue for the traveling exhibition “Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection,” which opens at the Cleveland Museum of Art on March 7. In between rounds of proofreading I was thinking of posts that might be appropriate for this Valentines Day weekend, and recalled one of my favorite couples from the Fenimore Art Museum folk art collection.

This pair of pastel portraits was done in about 1790, probably in Connecticut. They are a memorable pair for a variety of reasons. It’s amazing they ever survived for us to see them, first of all. Pastel is a delicate medium, chalky and prone to falling to the bottom of the frame if bumped too hard. These portraits were among those treasures found in the barn of Mr. and Mrs. William J. Gunn of Newtonville, Massachusetts, after their death in 1958. I wrote about the Gunn Collection in a previous post. Suffice it to say that an old New England barn is not a safe place to store pastels, or any works on paper.

Our New England couple is memorable for another reason. Look at their faces. Yes, it was a hard life in the early Republic, but these two go beyond tough. Their faces are decided uncomfortable, troubled, anxious. Turbulent. The rendering of their faces is, well, maybe a little too honest. Trained artists had skills and training that allowed them to flatter their sitters. Make them look a decade younger, a few pounds lighter, and better looking. The folk artist’s approach is, by contrast, called “warts and all.”

It was the turbulence in the faces, though, that lead me to the likely artist for this pair. There was another artist, an untrained limner, or portrait painter, working in Connecticut in the late 18th century who was known to capture the angst of his sitters in vivid facial expression such as these. His name was Winthrop Chandler, and an example of his work, a 1770 portrait of the Reverend Ebenezer Gay, can be seen here. You can see the similarity to our pair.

It is a shame that we don’t know the identity of our couple. In some ways, though, it gives us the freedom to call them whatever we want. The preferred name, since the late 1950s when they were acquired, is The Neurotic New England Couple. You won’t see this on any of our labels; it’s an oral tradition carried on only in my gallery tours. No one ever argues with the diagnosis.

New-Found Folk Art of the Young Republic

The discovery and collecting of American folk art in the middle of the 20th century led to some pretty dramatic stories about where these great artworks were found. One of the most dramatic of these stories involves some 150 paintings in the Fenimore Art Museum collection, some of which are now widely acknowledged masterpieces.

Marion Raymond was born in Massachusetts in 1881, the daughter of a patent lawyer who settled the family in Newtonville, outside of Boston. Her mother died when she was 19, and Marion and her widowed father spent a great deal of time thereafter traveling the world.

William J. Gunn was born in Portland, Maine in 1879, graduated from Harvard, and became an advertising manager at the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company in Chicago. In 1906 he learned that he had Bright’s disease, then erroneously thought to be fatal. He later wrote, “Now that I had been saddled with an incurable disease, I decided it would be nice to see a little more of the world.”

These two inveterate wanderers met overseas and were married in Yokohama, Japan in 1914. They settled in Newtonville. During their married life of 38 years, the Gunns traveled widely and collected extensively. All told they made three trips around the world before William died in 1952. A visitor to their house in the 1950s described it as a museum filled with possessions collected from all over the world. After Marion’s death in 1957 the collections were donated to non-profit organizations. One group of paintings was given by Marion to her long-time servant, Grace Marr, who offered them for sale to a private dealer.

I simply cannot imagine the dealer’s face when he saw where the collection had been stored. For reasons that are difficult to ascertain, William and Marion had collected some 600 folk art paintings and kept them in a barn on their Newtonville property. Many of the works had been removed from their frames; others were covered with dirt, bat and bird droppings, and barn paint.

The dealer quickly contacted another dealer, Mary Allis of Connecticut, who had the capital to buy the entire collection. She in turn offered the collection to Stephen Clark, who selected 150 of the best works to come to Cooperstown. By the time Louis and Agnes Halsey Jones catalogued and published this collection in 1960, the folk art world knew that its contours were forever changed by the surprise addition of this unknown collection of masterpieces.

Why did the Gunns collect these works so passionately? We can’t be sure, although some of the works reflect their travels abroad, like the great watercolor of Venice. But it is worth noting that many of the paintings, like the portraits seen here, depict children with pets. Although childless, the Gunns left alot of money to childrens' service agencies. They also were major benefactors of the SPCA. At the time of her death, Marion had no fewer than 20 cats. She did at one time have many dogs, but as she got older she rationalized, “I, of course, will soon go. Dogs would grieve for me, but cats will not cry, will live up their time.” Perhaps the collection was less the product of connoisseurship than it was of simple empathy.

Top: Boy in Gray with Dog, artist unidentified, ca. 1820. This impish youngster was immediately nicknamed "Butch" up on his arrival at the Fenimore Art Museum in 1959.

Upper left: Venice, artist unidentified, ca. 1850. Probably a schoolgirl watercolor done from a print. Notice the New England costumes of the "Venetians."

Upper right: Agnes Halsey Jones (second from right) at the openinig of "New-Found Folk Art of the Young Republic," featuring the Gunn Collection at Fenimore Art Museum in 1960. Notice the John Brewster Jr. portrait of Francis O. Watts with Bird just behind her.

Lower left: Little Child with Big Dog, by William Matthew Prior, 1848.