Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people, Part 15

Author:
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Number of Pages: 802

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ART

MASSACHUSETTS is rich in the substance of the arts. It has a good tradition in handicraft; it was once the stronghold of eminent Colonial portrait-painters; it counts among its residents renowned scholars in art and discerning collectors. Within its boundaries are treasures of enviable importance. The number of art museums is exceptional, and the State is honeycombed with historic houses fitted with Colonial furnishings. The early history of Massachusetts was virtually the history of art in the United States, for many of the outstanding painters and sculptors were either born in the State or had a foothold here. The people of Mas- sachusetts in their enthusiasm or indifference, their Puritanism or limited taste, are as responsible for the peculiarities of native art as the crafts- men themselves.

In the ways in which scholarly research can enrich understanding of the arts, Massachusetts is at an advantage. Museums are outwitting each other in acquisition of rarities and in publication of researches. While museums show increasing range of interest, each in its way has a splendid collection or a department in which it excels. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is particularly notable for superb Far Eastern treasure, while the Worcester Art Museum draws attention by its mag- nificent mosaics of the Middle Ages. The Smith College Art Museum has concentrated on modern French pictures, and at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, there is an exceptional display of Italian primitives. The Addison Gallery of American Art at Andover is one of the most important specialized collections of American art in the land. The latter and the Germanic Museum at Harvard show a marked interest in living art through exhibition and purchase. Other museums specialize in the historic, remaining comparatively indifferent to the problems of the living artist.

Since its earliest days, Massachusetts has not been a particularly hospitable environment for the living artist. Restraints of economic necessity and puritanic bias prevented a free expression in the arts from the very beginning. Colonial handicraft was directed toward articles of household use, furniture, utensils, pewter, silver, textiles; and in some solemn likenesses of early worthies. Based upon English prototypes, the

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articles were made to conform to local needs and, viewed today in the historic houses or museums, they show good taste and adaptation of materials. Puritanism was opposed in principle to art, and there was not the impulse of native taste or the urgency of demand to propel the imagination of artists. Years later, it was personal pride, luxurious in- dulgence, a forgivable conceit which prompted Americans to have their portraits painted, revealing unmistakably their forceful characteristics and newly acquired finery. It was a painting of form and feature, flounce and frill, with rarely a sidelong glance at nature, or critical observation of society. The early limners held forth with reserve, as artisans who had branched from the more useful calling of coach or sign painting, and some, in the well-known matter-of-fact manner, peddled their wares from house to house. They carried portraits painted completely except for the face, to be bargained for by the impending client.

The early portraits are flat and descriptive, lacking the lifelike char- acter and subtle handling of European portraiture of the time; possessing, on the other hand, the decorative beauty which to present-day taste is so appealing in provincial art. Some most interesting early portraits are to be seen in the Worcester Art Museum. On loan for many years has been 'Mrs. Freake and Baby Jane,' one of the handsomest and most touching of seventeenth-century portraits. 'John Freake' is there too, an imposing likeness in which particular attention has been paid to ornate costume. Not far from the Worcester Art Museum, in the American Antiquarian Society, are portrayals of Samuel and Increase and Cotton Mather (the latter painted by Peter Pelham about 1695-1751). Portraiture de- veloped in the eighteenth century into a specialty. John Smibert (1688- 1751) came from Scotland to Boston to paint, and incidentally designed Faneuil Hall in Boston. Joseph Blackburn (flourished 1753-1763), Robert Feke (about 1705-1750), Ralph Earle (flourished 1751-1761) were among the early exponents, and their portrayals are on exhibition at Harvard University and in the museums in Boston, Worcester, and Andover. The art of portraiture attained a notable height in the canvases of John Singleton Copley (1738-1815). In the opinion of many, Copley executed his finest pictures here at home, before he departed - in what was to become a too common practice among Massachusetts artists - to England to live. There was something in the native environment, in the types of personages he portrayed, in the limited tradition out of which his style developed that proved salutary to Copley. In England he lost individuality, acquired suaver traits. Colonial personalities, humble, smug, forceful, are clearly characterized in the Copleys shown throughout Massachusetts.

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Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) settled in Boston, where he painted out- standing Americans of the early republican days. The Athenæum por- traits of George and Martha Washington hang in the Boston Museum among other portraits by Stuart, which differ from the Copleys in the swift summary handling and the emphasis upon facial features and ex- pression, with comparative indifference to costume. Portraits in smaller dimension are scattered throughout the State. Besides its three hundred painted portraits, Essex Institute in Salem possesses a fine collection of silhouettes. Miniatures by Edward Greene Malbone (1777-1807) are in the Worcester and Boston Museums. Wax miniatures are displayed here and there in historic collections.

During the same period the household arts surpassed by far the pictorial arts. Cotton Mather had written that within a dozen years after the granting of the charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony 'artificers to the number of some thousands came to New England.' Among early silversmiths of Boston were such notables as Robert Sanderson (1608- 1693), who instructed many in the art, Jeremiah Dummer (1645-1718), John Coney (1655-1722), and, in the eighteenth century, the versatile Paul Revere (1735-1818), who, in addition to tankards, punchbowls, and candlesticks, made silver dental plates which he advertised as 'of real Use in Speaking and Eating.' The first articles of furniture of artistic significance to be made in the State were carved oak chests, which slowly evolved into highboys and writing-desks. John Goddard (1723-1785), who produced stately pieces in Santo Domingo mahogany, was born in Massachusetts but practiced his craft in Rhode Island. As early as 1638 crude glass lamps and bottles were being manufactured in Peabody, but Deming Jarves (1790-1868), head of the Boston and Sandwich glass works, revolutionized the glass industry with his new methods of furnace construction, his rediscovery of the method of manufacturing red lead, and his inventions in color-mixing. The Decorative Arts Wing of the Boston Museum has many interesting period rooms. The historic houses throughout the State give evidence of excellent handiwork, indicating the changes in taste from the early days of rigorous thrift to later luxury and finesse. Objects of folk-interest - samplers, coverlets, mourning pictures, painted Bible pictures - reveal imaginative qualities which painters in a more formidable craft lacked.

The art of carving found a particularly touching expression in grave- stones, which apparently deserved special attention in the solemn judg- ment of Colonials. Such memorials are extant in burying grounds of Deerfield, Salem, Concord, Boston, and towns on Cape Cod. They bear

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Massachusetts: The General Background

indications of an authentic talent for carving in decorative borders, sacred symbols, and ruminative epitaphs. It was an original and ap- propriate manner of commemoration, with far more vitality in design and feeling for the craft than was revealed in native plastic art of later date.

The demand for portraiture continued in the early days of the Re- public. Painters went abroad for study and stimulus. Massachusetts, which had such a favorable atmosphere for the ripening of Copley's style, could not hold its painters. They would wander afar, to London and Paris, and they were not shrewd enough to ally themselves with the best teachers, but contented themselves with the guidance of lesser lights. Benjamin West (1728-1820) took young Americans under his wing. Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872), seeking instruction abroad, boasted of having studied with Washington Allston (1779-1843), whose unfinished masterpiece, 'Belshazzar's Feast,' is in the Boston Museum. Massachu- setts artists were eager, but they lacked taste and tenacity. Abroad they responded to the official and obvious, and when they painted compositions they seemed to favor the literary and rhetorical. Morse gave up painting, as there was no market, no recognition, and turned to inventing, where his successes never consoled him for his failure as an artist. His 'Self Portrait' hangs in the Addison Gallery in Andover. Chester Harding (1792-1866) carried the portraiture tradition well into the nineteenth century, when changes were taking place with the rapid growth of the Republic and there were reverberations of political and industrial up- heaval abroad.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Winslow Homer (1836-1910) were both born in Massachusetts. There was little at home to foster the talents of a painter. One escaped to the solace and enhance- ment of European life; the other withdrew to solitude at Prout's Neck on the coast of Maine. Whistler possessed skill and wit. He had far better taste than most Americans, and his pictures are an odd mixture of influences from Turner to Degas, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Japa- nese. Whistler did not follow his fellow countrymen to the academy; not for him the sleek and photographic and artificial. He had a fine decorative sense, and a taste for the diffuse and atmospheric. His etch- ings give him rank with masters in that medium. Nevertheless he re- mained a wanderer, lacked a mooring, and fell short of greatness as a painter. Winslow Homer went abroad, but he did not stay for long. He found water color a more responsive medium for his direct, decisive re- action to the outdoors. He painted what he saw with the impact of the

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first fresh impression. It was straightforward, realistic portrayal, and it marks him one of the first Massachusetts painters with a dynamic style. Homer furnishes the moral to escaping artists. He helped to deliver the artists of New England from a sense of inferiority, from the uncontro- verted domination of foreign ideas which were not too well selected, not too thoroughly assimilated. Homer has risen in esteem, especially in recent years, for his peculiarly native qualities, and for the fact that he found his vigorous style through self-discovery.

Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917), born in New Bedford, also painted the sea, but his portrayal was veiled in poetry, shaded with mysticism, softened with sentiment. Ryder also avoided the American scene, not as Homer or Whistler had chosen to do, but by withdrawing into himself, painting from personal resource, inner feeling. In Deerfield dwelt an- other native artist who painted in a gentle sentiment, George Fuller (1822-1884). Boston-born Abbott H. Thayer (1849-1921) lavished tenderness upon his canvases of womanhood.

William Morris Hunt (1824-1879) exercised considerable influence upon Bostonians through his great interest in the Barbizon school in France, especially F. D. Millet. The atmosphere at home seemed un- sympathetic to him, too, and he longed for what was lacking: an impetus to paint. An entire gallery of his paintings is in the Boston Museum. His pupil and friend, John La Farge (1835-1910), was commissioned by Henry Richardson, architect, to paint murals in Trinity Church on Copley Square. On the same square stands the Boston Public Library, where murals cover the walls on the second and third floors. There is one series by the French neo-classicist, Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), the illustrative 'Quest of the Holy Grail' series by Edwin Abbey (1852- 19II), and the elaborately wrought theological sequence by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), to some his greatest performance. The Boston Public Library murals are very interesting and very provocative. All three differ in treatment, color, effect; they also differ greatly from the mural painting which has come rather suddenly into prominence in recent years with emphasis on scenes in history, social forces, and daily life.

Sculptors of Massachusetts have worked under a handicap that is more universal, for their special craft struggles to survive in a world which seems to find no urgent need of it. That native Americans enjoyed whittling and carving is apparent in their early houses, furniture, ship figureheads, gravestones, weather-vanes, wild fowl decoys, scrimshaw (there is an interesting collection in the Whaling Museum in New Bed- ford); but when they applied their gift to the formal art of portraiture,

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they showed little taste and insufficient vitality. Samuel McIntire (1757-18II) had a peculiar gift for carving portals and architectural decorations with the wholesome application of craft to function. That peculiar attribute of functionalism in style which is so often discussed today is rooted in the craft of Massachusetts. The most classical example is that of the Shaker workshops, which provided a variety of articles for daily use, admonishing the maker to do the job as efficiently as possible, with an eye to simplicity and usefulness.

Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) was one of the native sculptors who went to Italy to assimilate neo-classical ideas. But such ideas could not somehow be redirected with conviction by a native of Massachusetts. The sculptors, like so many painters, possessed enthusiasm and eagerness, but no commensurate creative imagination. Artistically they lacked roots. There were sculptors like Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886), Har- riet Hosmer (1830-1908), Thomas Ball (1819-19II), who did an eques- trian statue of George Washington that stands in the Public Garden in Boston. Many pieces are on view throughout the State, generally Ital- ianate or official in character. Most native are the diminutive groups ex- ecuted by John Rogers (1829-1904) of Salem, ingenuous portrayals of everyday life of Americans and realistic scenes of the Civil War, a de- scriptive sculpture, illustrating life in America, and true to life and aspirations in Massachusetts. At Essex Institute there is a very large collection of Rogers groups.

Counted among outstanding sculptures in Massachusetts are the 'Shaw Memorial,' a high relief in bronze by Augustus Saint-Gaudens opposite the State House in Boston, and 'Dean Chapin' by the same sculptor in Springfield. The 'Minuteman' in Concord and 'John Har- vard' in Cambridge were executed by Daniel Chester French, who had studied sculpture under a Boston teacher. Cyrus Dallin, sympathetic portrayer of the American Indian, is the sculptor of 'Appeal to the Great Spirit,' which stands in front of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

In Massachusetts until recent years a conservatism has prevailed, which resists stubbornly the experimental methods practiced in the world of art. The arbiters of taste have clung to Victorianism, or have released their energies in the study of art of remote times and remote places. The State has avoided the rapids of the main stream of con- temporary art, and has thus been safeguarded against the attendant risk and deprived of the inevitable exhilaration. Exhibition places, such as the Boston Art Club, the Copley Society, the Guild of Boston Artists, have been rather inflexible, showing works of acceptable stamp, often

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capably wrought, depictions in a conventional or photographic manner, softened renderings of Hals or Manet, with reminiscences of Munich, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the French Academy. Pictures there are in abundance of the pursuit of wild fowl, clippers at full sail, swelling surf, flowers and fruits and bric-à-brac in a rose-gold ambience, the New Eng- land countryside, woodland retreats, pools and freshets and marshlands, and pleasant people. Boston has had its special style, its exponents. Sargent set the pace in portraiture, brisk painting of texture, fleet, skillful rendering of features. Among members of the Boston group may be counted today Frank Benson, Edward Tarbell, Marian Sloane, Herman D. Murphy, Laura Coombs Hills, John Lavalle, Margaret Fitzhugh Browne.

Ideas are blowing across the boundaries. Resourceful and probing performers have infused a new spirit into the atmosphere. Art schools are altering their point of view; museums are enlivened by new and enter- prising directors. During the summer American painters have gravitated toward Provincetown and Gloucester, where the weather-beaten shacks and fisheries and townsfolk and dunes and surf and old-fashioned gardens provide choice subject matter. At Provincetown some talented artists live throughout the winter, among whom are Karl Knaths, Oliver Chaffee, Agnes Weinrich.

Among painters of the State, water color has been a popular medium. Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Dodge Macknight are ad- mired and emulated - Homer for realism, Sargent for skilled grasp of surface texture, Macknight for bold, translucent color. Macknight pro- voked Bostonians to well-known vituperation when he sent his brightly colored aquarelles from France in the 1890's. The reaction paralleled that of the French middle class at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 in Paris. There is a Bostonian water-color style based upon these fore- bears. rarely, however, as powerful or as concentrated as the originals. John Whorf is the most successful and most popular exponent of this local inherited style. Other aquarellistes of more independent spirit should be noted for peculiarly expressive handling of pigment, and for some engaging theories which they have invented. Among them are Carl Gordon Cutler, Harley Perkins, Katherine Sturgis, and Charles Hopkinson. The latter is interesting as a sort of dual personality, for he does able official portraits in a manner which is highly acceptable, then turns to water color apparently as a release for his fancy, to indulge an insatiable devotion to color, and to work out some tricky compositions.

The Boston Athenæum, founded in 1807, initiated in the community

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the policy of having annual exhibitions of pictures painted by local artists, or borrowed from local collectors. An Athenæum catalogue of 1831 lists with exceeding pride the 'Head of a Madonna' by Carlo Dolci. Taste in Boston today runs to early rather than late Renaissance pictures.

In 1855 the Boston Art Club was organized with the purpose of promot- ing social intercourse among artists and for the general advancement of art. Today, there are many art centers and schools. There are clubs of hobby artists; there is the Society of Independent Artists. There is furthermore the energetic group of artists in the Federal Art Project. But the range of interest in art is no longer a local matter. Some of our best craftsmen are young and not yet known; some are newcomers to the State with fresh points of view. The pace today is set by leadership elsewhere, in sources which have been more harmonious with present-day tendencies. Massachusetts is losing its peculiar qualifications, for better, for worse, in the broadening scope of taste and of activity in cosmopolitan art centers.

I I. MAIN STREET AND VILLAGE GREEN

Some cities and towns could not be conveniently described among the tours in Section III because of the amount of historical matter and the number of points of interest. For that reason, though appearing on the tours, they are described here, as well as all municipalities of 35,000 population or over, all seats of colleges, a number of historic shrines, and a few centers of varied interest.

The altitude is usually that of the municipal center, sometimes, if the former was not available, that of the railway station. Population is according to the 1935 State census. If you find a date of settlement twenty years earlier or later than one given here, yours is probably right, too. The same dates - and data - often differ in half-a-dozen reference books, and the Oldest In- habitant's memory can rarely be trusted. When sources differed too widely to be reconciled, the editors made a reasonable choice, or took refuge in such a phrase as 'the mid-nineteenth century.'

Brief general information is listed at the beginning of each town: railroads, inter-State bus service, piers and boat service, airports, accommodations, and information centers. Local information centers, each happily situated, like Anatole France's dog, in the exact center of the universe, are equipped to answer more specific questions.

A tour has been arranged for each city or town, starting at the municipal center except where, as in Boston and Cambridge, some other starting point was considered to be more convenient. Points of interest which are con- centrated or easy to find are merely numbered and listed with street addresses; otherwise driving directions are given. If the inordinate length of some of the tours within towns or cities appals you (Pittsfield's motor tour is over 30 miles long), console yourself, as you halt on a country road to shoo a flock of geese, that you are still 'in town,' as townships were abolished in Massachu- setts by an Act of the General Court on August 23, 1775.

AMHER ST . An Adventure in Quietude

Town: Alt. 302, pop. 6473, sett. 1703, incorp. 1775. Railroad Station: Main St., opposite Gray St., for Central Vermont R.R. Accommodations: Four hotels and several tourist houses.

Information: Hotel Lord Jeffrey, Bottwood Ave., cor. Spring St.

AMHERST, on its pleasant valley plateau within a circle of hills, is a dignified college town, the seat of two institutions of higher learning. Its quiet dwellings, elm-shaded streets, and general air of academic calm make it attractive and individual. It was named for Lord Jeffrey Am- herst, a British general in the French and Indian War. The town was originally a part of Hadley. Farming was the exclusive occupation of the community for three quarters of a century.

Later its two streams furnished water-power for a diversity of small and in general ephemeral industries. Shortly after the Revolution, a paper factory made its appearance, followed by three others in the next seventy years. About 1809, an abortive effort was made to spin yarn by machin- ery. Twenty-eight years later, improved processes made it possible to operate two woolen mills successfully. The fabrication of palmleaf hats and the temporarily popular 'Shaker' hoods for women marked the high-spot of Amherst's mass-production. Miscellaneous items such as sleds, baby-carriages, and rifles complete the catalogue of the town's manufactured goods.

The agrarian skill of the inhabitants and the lusty health of their cattle as shown in annual fairs attracted State-wide interest which culminated, in 1864, in the founding of Massachusetts Agricultural College, which later, with a broadened curriculum, became Massachusetts State College. The college was established as a result of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which allotted to Massachusetts the sum of $208,464 realized from the sale of 360,000 acres of land granted by the Federal Government. From a perpetual fund set up for the promotion of education in agriculture and the 'mechanic arts,' one third was to be given to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and two thirds to the Agricultural College.

Today this institution possesses a perfectly equipped dairy farm known as the Flint Laboratory, a model for the whole country, and an out- standing entomological collection. Since 1882 the State Agricultural Experiment Station has been located on forty-eight acres of land leased from the college.

More than forty years before the founding of the Agricultural College, a purely academic institution had chosen Amherst as its site. Founded

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in 1821, with the simple ideal of educating 'promising but needy youths who wished to enter the Ministry,' Amherst College had an initial enrollment of forty-seven pupils, with a teaching staff of two professors and the president. For many years emphasis was placed on missionary work and Amherst sent many graduates to the home and foreign fields.

Shortly after 1830, the slavery question nearly split its academic ranks. Financial stringency threatened to complete the ruin, but by heroic effort the college weathered this crisis and succeeded in establishing itself on a firm basis. Liberal education instead of mere vocational training has been the steadfast aim. Amherst was the first institution in the land to adopt student-government.

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Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people, Part 15

Author: Publication date: 1937 Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company Number of Pages: 802

Author:
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Number of Pages: 802