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The original DuPont mural panels
by Maxfield Parrish (1933)
Restored by University of Deleware Conservation Department at Winterthur
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The only major
exhibition for the
summer 2010 in the area featuring Cornish Colony artists is at the
Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, NH
The Tyler Museum of Art in Tyler, Texas will put on a major exhibition
featuring works from two major collections of Cornish Colony Art. The
collections are the Graham & Jean Devoe Williford Charitable
Trust
and the Peter and Alma Smith Private Collection. The dates of this show
are January – April 2011
The creative talents
of the artists of the Cornish Colony were
instrumental in shaping the aesthetic taste of the nation at the turn
of the past century. Today, many still consider that
aesthetic
standard to represent the Golden Age in American art and
culture.
This legacy is an integral part of the fabric of our national
heritage.
In 1885, at the invitation of his friend, famous New York attorney
Charles C. Beaman, Augustus Saint-Gaudens arrived in Cornish looking
for “Lincoln type men” to pose for this Standing
Lincoln
(1884-1887) sculpture. Saint-Gaudens acquired land and a decrepit
former tavern from Beaman and began inviting other artist friends from
New York to join him. In 1886, Thomas and Maria Dewing
arrived,
followed by Laura and Henry Walker, Charles Platt, and his friend
Stephen Parrish. His son Maxfield Parrish moved to the area with his
bride Lydia Parrish in 1898.
This forward looking artistic enclave soon drew other visitors and
friends from a nearby artist colony in Dublin, NH. Abbott
Thayer,
George de Forest Brush, Barry Faulkner and Kenyon Cox cajoled,
delighted and lavishly criticized each other’s work. The
camaraderie that existed between them was unparalleled.
Saint-Gaudens first coined the term: “A Circle of
Friends”, thus referring to the artists of both colonies.
This camaraderie gave America’s Gilded Age some of its finest
and
most esteemed men and women artists. Herbert Adams, Daniel
Chester French, Paul Manship, Frederick MacMonnies, James Earle and
Laura Fraser, John White Alexander, Henry and Edith Prellwitz and
Robert and Bessie Potter Vonnoh just to name a few joined the
Saint-Gaudens coterie of painters, sculptors and writers who
congregated here, to be inspired by and to be near their peers.
Today, every major American museum and art collection has in its
inventory choice works by these same artists, these icons of the Golden
Age.
Alma Gilbert-Smith, Director
March, 2010
Maxfield Parrish
"Vigil at Arms" (1904)
Private collection
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