Familiar places through artists’ eyes
Lyman Allyn exhibition showcases works of the Mystic art colony
The show is a collection of paintings depicting Mystic, Noank and Masons Island.
Charles H. Davis probably didn’t know what he was starting when he moved to Mystic in 1891 after a decade spent painting in France. The newly arrived artist taught local students as he continued to paint, with shifting cloudscapes among his specialties.
Soon other artists were joining him, entranced by the village’s terrain, houses and waterfront. Within a few years, Mystic was an art colony.
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum harvests the fruit of that colony in an exhibition that shows Mystic, Noank and Masons Island through the eyes of the artists they inspired.
“Picturing Mystic: Views of the Connecticut Shoreline, 1890-1950” is a gallery of familiar places exalted by brushstrokes. Its message is that art is all around us if only we are able to see it.
It’s in homey cottages and treelined streets. It’s in sturdy stone walls and tumbledown shacks. It’s in the bones of a ship under construction and the hulk of one left to rot.
To the average Mystic resident a century ago, these everyday scenes were barely noticed. But to the painters, most of whom came from somewhere else, they were the essence of the place and worth committing to canvas. Decades later, we can see it all as they did.
Two oil paintings, one by Nathaniel S. Little, the other by Carl Lawless, depict the same ordinary spot, seen from the end of Orchard Lane. A few houses appear in both, and the scenes are lovely in their contrasting approaches.
Little’s “Mystic in Winter” takes a low vantage point and is draped in the grayish hues of the season. Lawless’ “Sunrise in Mystic” surveys the area from higher up, its morning clouds lit orange from below by the rising sun. The houses seem to exist in different spheres at once.
Seeing the same place depicted by two artists is a recurring theme, as members of the colony presumably shared picturesque vistas they discovered with their colleagues.
A different kind of contrast pairs a painting with a modern photo of the same spot. Ernest Harrison Barnes’ “The Shady Street” shows Pearl Street from exactly a century ago. The houses remain intact, but in 1922 the street was roofed with a canopy of trees that filtered the sunlight, admitting occasional dapples to form patterns on the road. Today the trees are gone and with them some of the street’s charm.
Joseph Eliot Enneking’s “The Village Street” shows a magical, impressionistic blur of fall colors on High Street. But in a photo from today, the view is all utility poles and wires crisscrossing the sky.
Sometimes the transformation of past to present is even more jarring than that. Peter Marcus’ “From a New England Window” is a snowscape seen from a building at 61 West Main St. The thick brushstrokes produce a dreamy effect that softens and obscures details. If it transports you to another world, you’re jolted back to this one when you read that “Mystic Pizza is now located off to the right of this scene.”
About a quarter of the paintings are from the museum’s collection, and the rest belong to Jonathan Sproul, who grew up in Mystic but didn’t start collecting art from his hometown until 20 years ago, when he lived in Boston. Mystic paintings kept turning up in online auctions, they were affordable, “and it just snowballed from there,” he said.
Initially interested in how Mystic looked a century ago, Sproul expanded his hobby into research on the art colony and its painters. He’s developed an expertise on the subject.
“Now I can recognize one of those paintings a mile away,” he said.
The Mystic colony thrived for years, drawing artists from New York and Boston, as well as a group who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Others were natives, like George Victor Grinnell, who came from a local shipbuilding family. Henry Ward Ranger, who had founded the Lyme art colony in 1899, joined the Mystic group in 1905, Lyme having become “too crowded.”
The Mystic Art Association was established in 1913, and its first exhibition followed a year later. Soon after that, the Hartford Courant called the area “a premier painting ground,” one of the best in New England.
Sproul has researched the exhibition histories of both the Mystic and Lyme colonies, compiling voluminous information in two as-yet unpublished books he’s still working on. He said the current exhibition differs from others that have featured Mystic artists in that the theme is showing recognizable places.
A big part of the Mystic colony’s appeal was Masons Island. A perspective many artists chose was looking through trees and vegetation toward the mainland. Grinnell’s “Down on Mason’s Island” is typical. With the Mystic shore indistinct in the distance, the foreground is dominated by a stand of odd-looking trees whose twisting trunks angle skyward till they reach semicircular crowns of leaves.
The show’s overall impression is rural and pastoral, with mostly landscapes. But two Masons Island views are a reminder that industry was also part of the scene. Thomas Burnham Enders, the namesake of Enders Island, and George Albert Thompson portray a menhaden processing plant and a quarry, respectively. Unlike most other paintings, they linger on details of architecture and machinery.
If the mood of Masons Island’s landward views is one of yearning, then perhaps the object of that yearning is Noank. Lawless’ portrait of a white, seaside cottage there doesn’t show any people, but its peaceful vibe is summed up in the title: “Contentment.”
In Noank the sea’s influence is always close by. John Havard Macpherson’s “Bait Shack” is a still life of red and white lobster buoys stacked against the wall of an old building.
Noank’s seafaring spirit offered many paths to inspiration. William Bradford Green found it in the tilting masts of the Alice L. Pendleton, an abandoned lumber schooner that was a landmark for years. George Bertrand Mitchell saw it in the half-sunken hull of the Ella May, a fishing vessel that also outlived its time as a wreck.
Frederick K. Detwiller captured the beginning of a ship’s life in “Framing Up,” part of a series documenting Groton Iron Works, a World War I-era shipyard. He shows a U-shaped hull section being hauled into place.
Sproul, who is now president of the Lyman Allyn’s board of trustees, said the type of painting prevalent in Mystic changed over the years. Rather than a particular style, the colony was driven by the area’s natural beauty, which offered more than perhaps even Old Lyme did for the Lyme colony. It was “kind of like onestop shopping for the artists, really,” he said.
While the history of the Lyme colony remains prominent, the Mystic colony has been less well remembered, said museum curator Tanya Pohrt. It’s been overshadowed by tourism and Mystic’s other traditions, like shipbuilding.
A collection of smaller paintings, which serve as an introduction to the exhibition, depict a spot that was an especially popular subject. Noank’s North Dock, also called Potter’s Wharf, was a place of rundown structures and fishing gear that was immortalized on many a canvas before it was carried off by the 1938 hurricane.
We’ll never know how much more art would have resulted had it survived. The good news is that much of what is depicted in this show is still around, retaining its power to inspire future generations.