Monet, Corot, and American folk art in Shelburne, Vermont

If you love art but don’t drive out of your way to find it, you aren’t ever likely to wander into the Shelburne Museum. It’s out in the country in northern Vermont, a few miles south of Burlington, at least a couple of hours from where you might be vacationing in the Berkshires, the Adirondacks, or the White Mountains.  It’s also the sort of country where the signs say “Bear Crossing” instead of “Deer Crossing.”  We made it our last stop on a weekend driving vacation in New England.

The entrance to the Shelburne Museum doesn't really suggest what's beyond.

Even though there’s plenty of art to see; the Shelburne Museum isn’t really an art museum; it’s an American cultural history museum, akin to the Genesee Country Museum, near Rochester, or Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. Its collections are exhibited in thirty buildings on a sprawling campus that also has plenty of well-tended gardens; it was with some difficulty that we persuaded the wife of our bosom, who gardens, to stop picking the flowers and take pictures instead. A day at the Shelburne requires good walking shoes. If you run out of steam, you can find a bench and wait for the wandering shuttle to take you to the next exhibit you want to see, or back to the entrance.

The place is rich with artefacts of everyday life before the 20th century — a collection of old quilts, a covered bridge, a general store, an 1890 stationmaster’s office, a steamboat that used to cruise nearby Lake Champlain, and so on. Not understanding what we were in for, we didn’t allow ourselves nearly enough time. We devoted the couple of hours that we had mostly to the buildings that featured fine art.

Art lovers like us will probably want to make a beeline for the Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building, which looks like a small version of a Newport mansion and contains a modest but superb collection of 19th-century works by Monet, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Corot, and Remington. These formerly belonged to Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer, a 19th-century robber baron (sugar) who spent much of his fortune assembling a stupendous art collection. Louisine and H.O. gave most of it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but some of the best pieces passed to their daughter Electra Havemeyer Webb, who had a summer home in Shelburne. It is Electra’s varied collections that fill the exhibits at the Shelburne Museum.

The most dramatic of five Monet paintings was a large, glittering The Ice Floes (Les Glacons) (see just above). We were even more pleased with the Corots. There are none of his silver-gray landscapes, but the Shelburne does have several exceptional figure paintings by Corot, including a pre-Freudian Bacchante with a Panther.  On the walls of a room that reproduces Electra’s Park Avenue penthouse bedroom are several Degas pastels of dancers.

Our time at the Shelburne was made especially pleasant by the friendly folk who served as security guards. At most museums the people in uniform seem profoundly ignorant — you won’t get anything but a blank stare if you ask somebody at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art to direct you to the Matisses. But the senior citizens who watch over the collections at the Shelburne — volunteers? — not only know all about the Havemeyer family, but also a lot about the paintings and other exhibits. We like talking art with people.

One building is given to the works of a minor American regionalist painter, Ogden Pleissner, whom we first encountered a few years ago at the Canajoharie Art Museum (see this post), whose oil paintings and pastels remind you of both Homer and Hopper. In another building, the Stagecoach Inn, we found a smile-provoking collection of American folk art — sculpture, decorated furniture, and fancy rugs, as well as paintings. Many of these works are anonymous, and their creators probably didn’t even think of themselves as artists. But there are familiar names as well, including Grandma Moses, Edward Hicks (one of his versions of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians is here), and Erastus Salisbury Field. We were especially delighted with Field’s The Garden of Eden, a deliciously impossible landscape.

The Vermont shore as seen from the ferry

We never did figure out where the Shelburne Museum was exhibiting the other works of American art that it is supposed to own, including paintings by Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Fitz Henry Lane, Thomas Cole, and Eastman Johnson, because we ran out of time. It was nearly sunset on a gorgeous day when we pulled onto the ferry that is carrying cars, for free, to New York State across Lake Champlain from Chimney Point, Vermont while they’re replacing the bridge.

Ten pictures you shouldn’t miss at the Clark Institute

Renoir was Sterling Clark's favorite artist. This 1897 self-portrait is at the Clark.

 

We were just back to one of our favorites, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, which is inconveniently located in the mountain wilderness of western Massachusetts, several hours from anywhere. Of course, getting there over winding roads along mountain streams with breathtaking views of the Berkshires is part of the attraction. 

But the art collection is worth the trip. In fact, we would dare to rank the Clark (as it now calls itself) among the dozen best art museums in the United States. If you care for the work of John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Renoir, especially, it’s absolutely indispensable. And its special exhibitions — more compact than those you might see at the Met or the MFA in Boston and often better as a result — are always memorable. That’s the case with this summer’s striking side-by-side Picasso/Degas exhibit.  

Here is a modest list of ten pictures at the Clark that we wouldn’t want friends who visited the Clark to miss:  

1. Sunset, Saco Bay (Winslow Homer). Much of the art in the Clark was originally collected by Sterling Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune.  He had his prejudices; he didn’t like modern art at all, so you won’t see anything at the Clark by Matisse, Kandinsky, or Picasso (except in this summer’s exhibit) — not even Cezanne. And he apparently didn’t think much of American art, either — except, fortunately, for Homer and Sargent.  

We first fell for this dazzling 1897 painting — our very favorite Homer, and he’s our favorite American artist — when it visited Rochester in 1988 as part of a marvelous traveling exhibition of Homer’s marine paintings. The scene is Saco Bay, on the southern coast of Maine, not far from Prout’s Neck, where Homer lived and worked towards the end of his life. The women, with their traps, remind you of the paintings of fisher folk that Homer did a couple of decades earlier in England.  

We missed seeing Sunset, Saco Bay on our July visit. It’s evidently out on loan somewhere.  

2. The Onions (Pierre-Auguste Renoir). Mr. Clark clearly loved the French impressionists best, and Renoir most of all.  When you think of Renoir you think of women in various states of dress and undress, but his still lifes are wonderful. The Onions is our favorite of the dozens of Renoirs, including several still lifes, at the Clark.  

3. Fumée d’Ambre Gris – Smoke of Ambergris (John Singer Sargent)  The ancient Egyptians burned ambergris (a kind of whale secretion) as incense, and evidently some Algerians still did when Sargent visited northern Africa in 1879.  In this 1880 painting, was this a priestess, or simply an upper-class woman seeking the intoxicating (and supposedly arousing) effects of the fumes?  There’s just no other Sargent painting like this large, dramatic study in whites. The Clark’s smaller Sargent pictures of Venice scenes are favorites of ours too. 

4. Undertow (Winslow Homer). Did one of these unfortunate women perish trying to save the other? The lifeguards seem philosophical, as if reminding themselves that they did their best to warn swimmers about the dangerous undertow. The simple composition of this 1886 Homer masterpiece reminds us of Poussin’s paintings of classical scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 

5. The Snake Charmer (Jean-Léon Gérôme).  Besides Renoir and Homer, Mr. Clark’s special interests included the European academic painters of the late 19th century, who could get away with frankly sensual pictures.  Could Gerome have actually witnessed titillating private performances like this in the Middle East, with a nude, snake-entwined youth performing to the music of an exotic flute for half-drugged men with, shall we say, specialized tastes? 

6. The River Oise near Pontoise (Camille Pissarro). Sometimes we like Pissarro’s early paintings best, with their willfully flat areas of color (usually muted like the greens and blues in this one); sometimes we lean to his more heavily textured late pictures. This 1873 painting records a moment of change: the near riverbank still probably looks as it had for hundreds of years, while the factories and smokestacks have already transformed the far bank forever. 

7. Farm in the Landes (Pierre Étienne Théodore Rousseau). One of the pleasures of returning to any familiar museum is seeing what’s new. At the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, which we also visited on our recent New England jaunt, our hearts were gladdened to see a lovely, recently-donated, garden-and-river painting by Willard Metcalf.  

In Williamstown, what was new was this large, vivid rural scene by Theodore Rousseau.  A little internet research discloses that the Clark apparently bought it at auction in 2009 for something in excess of $1 million. We think it’ll be the centerpiece of what was already a remarkably fine group of works by the Barbizon painters, including Corot, Troyon, and Millet. 

8. Girl with Sleeping Dog (Renoir). We feel sorry for the art-loving French.  What must they think when they come to America, make the rounds of art museums from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Washington and out to Chicago, and realize that we’ve got a lot more of the French Impressionists than they do?    

But the French won’t really feel the enormity of what’s they’ve lost without coming to Williamstown, Mass.  We judge there are more Renoirs in the Clark than anywhere else in America except the Barnes Foundation and the Met — in fact, probably more than in any European museum besides the Musée d’Orsay.  Girl with Sleeping Cat is perhaps the best-known Renoir at the Clark.  

9. Apples and Grapes in a Basket (Alfred Sisley). Monet, Renoir, and Degas may be more popular, but our tastes in French impressionism tilt toward Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, both of whom are generously represented at the Clark. This Sisley is special, a still life instead of his usual landscapes.  

10. Hunting for Eggs (Homer 1874). Yes, this is the third Homer on this short list, but it’s a watercolor, and it’s part of possibly the best collection of Homer watercolors anywhere (those at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Met are worthy rivals). The group includes gentle genre pictures like this one as well as Adirondack lake and stream scenes (you’ve got to see the jumping trout).  

We didn’t see any of the Homer watercolors this summer; for conservation reasons they aren’t exhibited very often. We watch the Clark’s website for them; they’re sure to be back on display one of these years. They’re worth driving a long ways to see.

Sunday in the Park with George at the Shaw Festival (a review)

Anthony Malarky and Julie Martell as Louis the baker and Dot

On our way home from Niagara-on-the-Lake, we tried to think how they could have made Sunday in the Park with George more . . . well, more interesting. Better leads? Not the problem. Steven Sutcliffe and Julie Martell (as George and Dot) both sang well, acted well, looked well. We really didn’t think the show was badly paced.

It was hard to pinpoint any particular problem with the Shaw Festival’s show. But we both had trouble staying awake, and so did other people in the seats around us. Rochester friends who saw the show a week later reported the same.

There’s an expression “as exciting as watching paint dry.” That’s not literally what we were doing at the Royal George Theater, but it’s not much of a stretch between that and watching someone sketching a model and then watching him work on a painting, one tiny stroke at a time, in his studio.

Of course, this Stephen Sondheim musical does tell a story. And it revolves around one of the world’s most celebrated paintings, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (at the Art Institute of Chicago).

Seurat's large painting Bathers at Asnières is at the National Gallery in London

The first half of this musical play is a fictional vignette in the life of young Georges Seurat, whose first major work, Bathers at Asnières, was mocked by the critics.  George is now applying his innovative, dot-by-dot style to another, even more ambitious painting (ten feet wide) of Parisians enjoying the sun and the sights in La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine.

George's models for Bathers at Asnières

We meet George on the island working on a sketch for his new painting. His model (and mistress, who is in love with him) Dot is having trouble keeping still for him; she sings a song about how hot and uncomfortable she is. Colorful characters, including a mentally confused old lady (Sharry Flett) who turns out to be George’s mother, wander past George and Dot. They all end up in the painting. Dot is the young woman on the right with a parasol.

Several years after the scenes in the play, in 1888, Seurat painted Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor, also in his pontillistic style. This smaller painting is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Back in George’s studio, Dot sings about how frustrating it is to have a lover who spends all his nights painting instead of paying attention to her and taking her to the Follies.  Out on the town by herself, Dot meets and is courted by Louis the baker, who is planning to emigrate to America.  Should she marry the steady Louis, who will take care of her even though she is carrying George’s baby, or stick it out with George? Meanwhile, George’s paintings continue to be unappreciated by the Parisian art world. We learn most of this through the show’s songs; there’s relatively little dialogue.

All this takes place in 1884. The second act, somewhat more lively than the first, takes place a hundred years later in 1984 (which, not coincidentally, is when the show was premiered on Broadway). The “George” in the second act (also played by Steven Sutcliffe) is the fictional great-grandson of Georges Seurat, who died in 1891 at the age of 31.

George works the crowd

Twentieth-century George is an artist too; he creates Chromolumes, which are a kind of electrified sculpture and invention. Like his famous ancestor, he struggles with gaining recognition and funding for his work. At an art museum gala, George unveils and demonstrates his latest Chromolume, which is supposed to relate to Seurat’s masterpiece; with him is George’s very elderly grandmother, who is Dot’s daughter (born in America), and who tells the gathering about the people in Seurat’s painting.  At a reception afterward, George works the crowd, flattering potential patrons for his art. 

Of course Sunday in the Park With George won a Pulitzer in 1984, and who are we to argue? And personally, we enjoyed Stephen Sondheim’s sophisticated score, which riffs off Seurat’s pontillistic style of painting with short jagged motifs and dissonant chords. This music is challenging, but we disagree with those who say the tunes in this show aren’t memorable.

But it must be said that Sunday in the Park With George, taken as a whole, just isn’t compelling drama. The characters aren’t terribly interesting or sympathetic, and if the show’s creators meant to say something profound about Art and the plight of misunderstood artists, we failed to see that it was especially profound. For us the play had a kind of static quality. Much of the time nothing much seemed to be happening; halfway through the first act we felt as if we were waiting for Godot. The energy level rose during the whirlwind of the art museum reception in the second act; only then, and only briefly, did we feel drawn into the lives of the characters.

As for this particular production of Sunday in the Park With George at the Shaw Festival, which is well done, we have no complaints.

One of the very few other large-scale paintings by Seurat, titled The Bathers, is at the Barnes Foundation, in Merion, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. A good portion of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is reproduced by Seurat in the background of the Barnes picture.

And we were tickled to see some of our favorite works of art on stage. As nearly as we can determine, the character of Dot, Georges Seurat’s mistress, is not a historical personage, so we didn’t learn much more about Seurat or his famous painting than we already knew. But we do like Seurat, and we enjoyed the fantasy of being present at the creation of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. And we were amused by the end of the first act, when all the characters arranged themselves on stage in a tableux that recreates the painting.

Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières is also seen on stage early in the first act. And in this show one of Claude Monet’s best-known paintings, Garden at Sainte-Adresse, also makes a cameo appearance in the arms of of a rich American who is carrying it onto a ship that will take him (as well as Dot and Louis the Baker) to America. The scene (improvised by the director and not in the script) represents, we suppose, the cultural drain of art masterpieces from Europe to America. As a matter of history, the use of Monet’s painting is a bit of a stretch. According to information on the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Garden at Sainte-Adresse was purchased from Monet by one Victor Frat, apparently a Frenchman, before 1870. The painting did not come to America until 1926; the Met bought it at a Christie’s auction in 1967.

Emsworth reviews of other 2009 shows at the Shaw Festival :

John Osborne’s The Entertainer (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)