Kennebunkport to Portland

the day started in Kennebunkport: this is St Anne's Episcopalian church, very near the water's edge and the start of a walk along the shore; and this the Bush compound - with many, many people pulling over to take photographs.  Alice suggested that maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to ask people about their politics - something that I promptly disobeyed (there are times when an English accent is a terrific accent) and asked the nearest couple what they thought about GHWB.  Interestingly ... they were from Virginia - had voted for, and supported him; then switched to Obama, and think the present incumbent is ... well, we were in agreement.  But they said how very many of their neighbors know nothing, are utterly under-informed, and still believe he's wonderful.  So ... it was actually worth asking ...

Up the coast to Portland, to visit a friend and her cat (who of course is a Maine Coon).

Is this the only cat in a Winslow Homer painting or drawing?  It was in the excellent Winslow Homer as etcher show in the Portland Art Gallery;

as were numerous examples of his drawings turned into magazine illustrations

(more or less us, yesterday);

plus my favorite Homer fish;

and the Life Line, which I include in my book, arguing that the women's tattered dresses look like seaweed.  We then found a WHOLE SEAWEED SHOP, where I spent far too much money on seaweed tea and seaweed soap and seaweed chile crisp (yes, really), and tried to persuade them that they'll really want to stock Habitatscapes, with its seaweed chapter ...

and then we took our friend out to dinner at Fore Street, winner of this year's James Beard award, and worth every single last delicious bite (and sip).

 

up the coast and out to sea

Up the coast from Boston, and a picnic lunch at Salisbury - and then on up to Kennebunk.  Here, I developed a new understanding of Winslow Homer, heading off to sea in a ketch for an hour or so, and finding that the North Atlantic heading into mid October isn't exactly flat.

I loved it - just the right degree of roughness - but Alice (who'd not been out on a sailing boat ever before) went a slightly queasy greenish pale color - which was better than the man next to her, who spent a long time with a plastic bucket.  Truly, it wasn't that bad, and the sun was out, and the sky blue (but there again, I don't get seasick, so I'm quite happy to be be buffeted around (especially in retrospect.  But it was truly exhilarating.

 

A face from the past

It's Bitzi!  I last saw her in the spring of 2017, when we left her off with Alice's sister, who has converted her from a shy, screwed up feline, bullied by the other cats to ... well, a marginally less petrified cat.  She is now 18!!  Who thought she would live so long?  So I called in today to visit Alice's sister in West Hartford, and to - well, I suppose say goodbye to the Bitz.  She's rather antique, but unarguably very much herself, and still treating me with a mixture of disdain and superiority.

 

Hudson, Thomas Cole, and Catskills

More Hudson Hallowe'en decor ...

... then to Thomas Cole's house: not usually - except in October - open on Mondays, and blissfully empty.  Here's his peaceful porch - so much quieter and contemplative than Church's exhausting taste.

Much of the art on display there I've seen before, although I didn't remember his pressed flowers: these (mostly pansies) are from Shakespeare's garden in Straford on Avon (if I thought, I'd have come home with a Cole leaf, and some Michaelmas daisy flowers);

and this I think is a new donation: it's the central portion of his color wheel.

But what I'd really come to see was Valerie Hegarty's new installation.  Valerie has generously let me reproduce an image of one of her installations in Habitatscapes: if I'd seen this earlier, this might well have taken its place.  It's based on Cole's View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1838) and on plates painted by his daughter Emily: as you can see, the non-human natural world is taking over, and breaking out of the frame (and there are wallpaper designs from this house, and from Hegarty's childhood bedroom, melded into the memory work, too).

The Catskills beckoned from Cole's study window.

Last time I was here (exactly the same time of the year, five years ago) was during drenching rain, and I had to drive up the winding mountain road in thick cloud: today was pretty much perfect, and everything looked like, yes, a Hudson River school painting.  Here's Kaaterskill Falls;

and in the other direction ...

Walk up, and up, and you get the view!

This was the site of the Catskill Mountain House - as seen in the Cole painting hanging on the wall of his house - which hung on until the 1950s, and was ultimately destroyed by the state in 1963 since it was on wild land.  

You never know who you're going to be driving behind.

 

more art, more Fall

Here in Hudson, one can't miss the season ... this is one of the best, spookiest Halloween sights ever, surely.

But just in case any one had missed it - and coming from the heat of California, that would be excusable - try this shop doorway -

or simply an outdoor wear store.

Today was for Frederic Church's Olana, with all its Orientalist taste - "taste" -

but especially the Frederic Church: Global Artist show (I recommend the book that accompanies this, although, being Heavy, it isn't with me).  Although only two rooms, they were perfect rooms, and contained a lot of stuff I've never seen in person before - a good deal of it from the Smithsonian.  It was great to see this early (1844-45) Hudson Iron Works,

and - here's just a lovely corner of it - his 1858 Cayambe, with what looks like some ancient Maya art work ...

and of course, after looking at Cole's brush work yesterday, one might wonder what his pupil would do with rushing water (at Niagara, no less).

From his bedroom, one can see a kind of summerhouse structure ...

... an installation by Ellen Harvey, Winter in the Summer House, which show an invented glacial landscape (supposedly illuminated by sunlight filtering through the lines, but it was a dark day, and there wasn't any).

Then down for a walk by the lake, and up to the view from Crown Hill Road - which FC constructed so that one could see Olana well.

Ah, the leaves, the leaves ...this is so unquestionably my favorite season.

 

Hartford - mostly details

I've known for years that the Wadsworth Athenauem, in Hartford CT, was a major collection that I'd never managed to visit - despite a strangled plan or two - but I made it there, at last, and it was more than well worth it.  And although Hartford itself seemed like a wasteland of tall financial services buildings when I drove in last night, today it revealed itself to have some magnificent buildings and history - and it seems to be a city with a good deal of progressive community energy (I liked the sign outside the First/United Church of Christ that read "Radical to the Roots since 1632").

The Wadsworth itself (and yes, it calls itself The Wadsworth - I thought it would be The Athenaeum, like the club) was magnificent,

with the main hall being an obvious site for wedding photos ...

There's a small, and eclectic, but rather good collection of Victorian paintings: a Black servant in Thomas Faed's From Hand to Mouth - He Was One of The Few Who Would Not Beg (1879) about the pride of an itinerant man with two children and a monkey (gobbling cabbage leaves) - we've seen him in Faed's painting of a village school, too.  

Some rather lurid bits of weaving apparatus - and a dove - and a weirdly carved chair - in Holman Hunt's Lady of Shalott;

a hand and some flower petals in Leighton's Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis.

At about this point, the museum guard came and asked me if I was particularly interested in British art, because their really good collection was of American art ... and I explained in my Best British Accent that I'd especially wanted to come and see these ... and a painting that for some strange reason was down with furniture on the floor below, Thomas Armstrong's lovely aesthetic interior, The Lesson (1865).

But why is Mama holding an orange??

The American collection is, of course, superb.  But I was especially struck by details of paint, rather than things: Thomas Cole's loose brushwork painting a waterfall in Kaaterskill Falls (1826);

Frederic Church's rather splotchy foliage (and a little bird) in Mountains of Ecuador.

I liked these two guys in Ashley Durand's View toward the Hudson Valley (1851),

... and here I am in Hudson, in an AirBnB that manages to disguise its similarity to a grad school apartment by being painted a very, very rich dark blue, and by scattering a remarkably large number of pillows with octopuses on them. In Hudson?