A baby’s first experience with fine art at the Chrysler Museum of Art

Nearly five months old, the little guy was excited to see his first Winslow Homer at the Chrysler Museum of Art

Last weekend found us visiting our fine new grandson and his parents in their new home in Hampton, Virginia (a ten-hour drive from Rochester).  The little fellow was a newborn no longer and needed to be introduced to high culture, and we were anxious to visit the Chrysler Museum of Art, in nearby Norfolk — we’d never been.  So off we all went. The little guy seemed as tickled with the colorful stuff on the museum walls as his grandfather was.

Frankly, the Chrysler Museum of Art might not be the best art museum for a neophyte to visit. It has no Rembrandt, van Gogh, Cezanne, or Picasso, and none of the paintings you see on art prints and posters.  Its best-known piece is probably Gauguin’s “The Loss of Innocence,” which uses pretty much the same color scheme as our grandson’s onesies and blankets.  (We blushed, at a loss for words, when the intellectually curious boy, with a questioning look, mutely demanded an explanation of the picture’s symbolism.)  Nevertheless, with only a few exceptions (disappointing pieces by Corot and Monet), the overall quality of the works at the Chrysler, from the Old Masters to the modern masters, seemed very high.  We judge that, in assembling this collection, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. opted for first-rate works by second-tier artists rather than second-rate works by the most popular artists.

New museums usually mean pleasant surprises.  The one we enjoyed most was a large, wide 1868 canvas by Gustave Doré entitled “The Neophyte (First Experience of the Monastery),” a witty portrait of a terrified young monk sitting with a row of grubby older monks, clearly wondering what possessed him to take orders.  We had known Doré only as the painter of landscapes like the dramatic “The Scottish Highlands” at the Toledo Museum of Art, which is a favorite of ours. Mr. Chrysler deserves credit for snapping up this Doré masterpiece instead of throwing away his money on a mediocre Picasso.

And we are always delighted to stumble across anything by James Tissot, a Paris-trained Frenchman who didn’t follow friends like Degas, Manet, and Whistler into impressionism, but instead found his niche in the art market painting fashionably dressed women and their consorts in social settings. The Chrysler’s “The Artists’ Wives” is Tissot at his best.

There must have been a period of time in the last century when art collectors could snap up pontillistic paintings by the contemporaries of Georges Seurat at reasonable prices. (Pontillism is a technique in which a canvas is covered, not with brushstrokes of paint, but with hundreds of small dots of paint; the viewers’ eyes blend the colors.) Like the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which we visited several years ago, the Chrysler Museum has a modest group of works in the pontillistic vein. We were especially attracted to one by Maximilien Luce, called “The Footbath,” that showed the influence of Millet. It might well have illustrated a scene from Zola’s L’Assommoir, a late-19th-century novel about lower-class Parisians in desperate poverty that we had just read.

This American art lover’s trip to Norfolk gave him a chance to see less familiar but nevertheless worthy pieces by Winslow Homer, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Childe Hassam (the Chrysler exhibits his masterpiece “At the Florist” in the same gallery as the European impressionsts), John Henry Twachtman, Reginald Marsh (an especially risque nightclub scene), and Richard Diebenkorn. But the museum’s strength is in European art, which covers 600 years and (besides the paintings already mentioned) includes first-rate works by Veronese, Jan Gossaert, François Boucher, Pissarro, and Matisse (both works by these last two artists were out on loan when we visited; we saw the Pissarro in a fine exhibit at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts last fall).

One thing more about the museum in Indianapolis: when we were there with the new baby’s daddy several years ago, we were amused to find that a Homer (“The Boat Builders”) prominently featured in the museum’s promotional materials was in fact one of the smallest Homer oil paintings we’d ever seen (about 7 x 14 inches). But the Chrysler can top that. Besides an exceptionally fine 1882 impressionist double portrait by Renoir (see just above), the Chrysler boasts what’s surely as small a Renoir oil painting as you’ll ever find, a 5 x 7 inch vignette-style painting called “Trees by the Edge of a River,” which the museum bought in 1989 after soliciting 20,000 contributions from members of the public. We’d be curious to know exactly what it cost.

American Impressionists at the Michener Art Museum

It’s well off the beaten path, but this the art museum junkie has found another small American art museum that he’d like to visit again if he ever has a chance. It’s the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which is about halfway between Philadelphia and Allentown.

The museum is, of course, named for the prolific late author of Hawaii and other historical novels; Emsworth used to read him (The Source was his personal favorite). It was Michener’s money and art collection that made the museum possible, and in fact the museum includes a small re-creation of his study, with his typewriter (the very typewriter he’s shown with in the picture above), some manuscripts, parts of his library, and so on. But the focus of the museum is on a modest collection of American art, not on Michener.

The Michener Art Museum is about 20 years old, and it’s a counterpart of sorts to the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. (See my post on the Griswold museum.) While the museum in Old Lyme focuses entirely on American impressionists who worked at the art colony there, like Willard Metcalf and Childe Hassam, the best part of the collection at the Michener consists of first-quality examples of painters who worked at the New Hope art colony in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, including two of my favorite American impressionists, Edward W. Redfield and Daniel Garber. (Redfield’s 1912 painting “Cherry Blossoms” is just above.)

The works of these Pennsylvania impressionists resonated strongly with Emsworth, a native of the Commonwealth. In the northwest part of the state where I grew up, not much has changed in the last hundred years; many of the old houses, barns, and garages are still standing. Redfield’s richly worked Fleecydale Road (above) was probably painted a hundred years ago (it has no date), but it’s a scene I recognized from my youth during the 1960s. It’s quintessentially Pennsylvanian, and of the paintings on display during my visit, I liked it best.

The pride and joy of the Michener Art Museum is a large, dramatic mural by Daniel Garber, dated 1926, entitled A Wooded Watershed, which is beautifully displayed at the end of the museum’s large gallery of Pennsylania impressionists. It’s at least 15 feet wide. I would have been interested to know where A Wooded Watershed was originally installed before this museum acquired it, but didn’t see anything about its history.

Some of Garber’s work has an almost magical, fairy-tale quality; one especially pleasing Garber painting entitled Springtime in the Village fell in this category. For reasons that are probably not obvious from my photos, Springtime in the Village, which is dated 1917, reminded me almost immediately of a 1892 painting by the French post-impressionist Paul Serusier titled Apple Picking that had appealed to us greatly when we saw it some years ago in an exhibition focusing on the School of Pont-Aven. An exhibit at the Michener indicated that Garber had studied in France for a couple of years; I wondered if Garber became familiar with Serusier’s work. Garber’s palette for this painting also reminded me of another Pont-Aven picture, Gauguin’s Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen), which is now at the Indianapolis Art Museum.

I was struck once again with the fact that while hardly any European artists that we know in America today were painting in an impressionistic style after about 1910, many Americans continued to paint in an impressionistic style through the middle of the twentieth century. Most of the paintings I saw at the Michener Art Museum were impressionist landscapes. The finest, however, I felt, was an outstanding 1914 portrait by Garber of his wife in a kimono, entitled The Studio Wall.

Other American impressionists on display included Walter Schofield, William L. Lathrop, and George W. Sotter. In other, smaller galleries there were some modern paintings by Elsie Driggs, Karl Knaths, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others, and a few from the first part of the nineteenth century. I gather from the Michener Art Museum’s website that it has a much larger collection than it presently has room to display. For now, this is a small museum.