Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1994 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

Thomas Cole's Cabin in the Woods, North Conway, N.H. has been acquired by the Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Believed to have been painted near the end of Cole's life, the canvas remained in the artist's family until 1987. Judging by the sparseness of the foreground, Cabin in the Woods is probably unfinished, for Cole generally began with the deep background of a picture, filling the foreground with a mass of details such as old tree stumps, branches, plants, rocks, and the like. The painting brings the work of one of America's major landscapists to the museum and provides an apt counterpart to Asher B. Durand's Symbol of 1856, also in the collection. The two represent different aspects of the Hudson River school: whereas Cole's small canvas portrays a distinctly American view in which man is dwarfed by nature, Durand's large, sweeping panorama of unidentified majestic mountains is based on a literary source--Oliver Goldsmith's poem "The Deserted Village."

Brillo Box (Soap Pads) is one of three silk-screened wood sculptures created by Andy Warhol in 1964 that have recently been acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. A former commercial artist and illustrator, Warhol used silk-screen printing, a commercial process, to simulate the mechanical look of mass production when he became preoccupied with replicating consumer products. So successful was he that Canadian customs officials attempted to classify a shipment of these sculptures as merchandise, subject to a 20 percent duty. Meanwhile, in America Warhol's sculptures became the quintessential commentary on a consumer society at the mercy of mass production and marketing strategies. Moreover, they are emblematic of a mining point in the history of American creativity, when art collided with everyday life.

Best known for his portraits of hearty New Englanders done in a realistic style, Charles W. Hawthorne also executed a small number of landscapes. Rendered in a more painterly manner and in a lighter, brighter palette, they reflect the influence of William Merritt Chase, with whom Hawthorne studied during the summers of 1896 and 1897 at Shinnecock, near East Hampton, Long Island. Typical is his Tiffany's Estate, Laurelton Hall, illustrated on page 582. Hawthorne is recorded as visiting the grand summer house of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) in Oyster Bay, New York, in 1926. By then the house was functioning as the art school of the Tiffany Foundation, where students were "surrounded...with endless beauty and every luxury," as Hugh McKean, one of them recollected in The "Lost" Treasures of Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1980. At the Museums at Stony Brook, Hawthorne's painting will enhance a collection of Tiffany's beautiful and luxurious art glass.

Along with Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf was one of the leading figures in the art colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut, early in this century. Metcalf and other members of the colony boarded with Florence Griswold (1850-1937) in Old Lyme in what is now the Florence Griswold Museum. Seven of Metcalf's sketchbooks and his diary for 1876 recently have been added to the museum's collection of paintings, pastels, drawings, and off sketches by the artist.

The sketchbooks range in date from 1875 to 1914, with the majority from the late 1870's and early 1880's. Three of them document Metcalf's trip to the Southwest in 1881 and 1882, two have sketches of Boston and its environs, one was compiled in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the latest contains Italian views (one of which is directly related to a study of Pelago, Italy, already in the museum's collection). Metcalf's diary describes his often stormy apprenticeship with the Boston artist George Loring Brown.