Florence Griswold Museum showcases work by Matilda Browne
Matilda Browne may have mainly painted just two themes: flowers and farm animals. But the prolific artist, whose career spanned five decades, found endless ways to capture the beauty and grace of her favorite subjects.
In "Matilda Browne: Idylls of Farm and Garden," the Florence Griswold Museum presents the first solo exhibition of Browne's work — and the first ever in a museum. This is the latest in the museum's series of retrospective exhibitions highlighting artists of the Lyme Art Colony, of which Browne was a prominent figure.
Browne (1869 to 1947) was a pioneer, embraced as a gifted professional artist at a time when very few female artists were even recognized. And in specializing in paintings of animals — particularly large farm animals — she also broke into a field previously dominated by male artists.
The show was formed in partnership with Amy Kurtz Lansing, the museum's curator, with Susan G. Larkin, guest curator and art historian. Larkin lives in Greenwich, where Browne lived and painted as an adult when she wasn't in Old Lyme.
Kurtz Lansing explains that the reason Browne's work hasn't received a lot of exposure until now is that she died in 1947, an era when the public was more interested in Abstract Expressionism than Impressionist painting.
"It wasn't until the 1970s and '80s that a lot of attention turned back to American Impressionism," Kurtz Lansing says. "Yet, she's been such a staple here. She's someone we talk about all the time."
The Florence Griswold and the Bruce Museum in Greenwich are the only two museums that actually own works by Browne, and not a lot of archival material had survived about the artist.
"That expresses to some extent the way women artists haven't been studied as much as male artists," Kurtz Lansing says. "And so that added another layer of challenge. If you can't see the works and they're hidden away in private hands, how do you research about them? It was a long, slow process to track down her paintings."
The specific impetus for the exhibition, Kurtz Lansing notes, was the museum's 2013 acquisition of Browne's Impressionistic masterpiece, "Peonies."
"That really was the tipping point in saying we really need to do an exhibition that celebrates what Matilda Browne was capable of," she says. "The painting is in its original frame, and we think it depicts the garden of Katharine Ludington, who lived in town and was also a prominent suffragist who went on to be a founder of the League of Women Voters — but also loved and cared for her family's garden."
Larkin began researching Browne's work, at first for her own pleasure.
"The Florence Griswold did a really good show in 1982, 'Old Lyme American Barbizon,' in which Matilda Browne was prominently featured, and it reinforced my impression of her as a Barbizon painter, as a painter of cattle," Larkin says.
"As time went on, I began to realize her scope was much broader. One of the things that impressed me was that, as she changed from Barbizon style to Tonalism to Impressionism, she didn't abandon each style, she merged them and would use whichever style worked for the mood she wanted to convey."
Browne was also an accomplished watercolor painter, and she experimented with sculpture.
"She was somebody trying new things. She wasn't an innovator. I don't think you could make that claim, but she was always pushing herself to excel," Larkin says. "She had the self-confidence to say, in her 20s, that her ambition was to be the American Rosa Bonheur (famous French artist). It sounds boastful, but it was how she honestly felt."
A child prodigy, Browne began her art training early on with her parents' encouragement. She studied informally from the age of 9 with renowned landscape painter Thomas Moran. At 14, one of her floral paintings was included in the American Watercolor Society's annual exhibition and, by 21, Browne was exhibiting in many prestigious shows. Between 1887 and 1892, she studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, and later in Holland with American cattle painter Henry Bisbing before returning to the States.
"She really hustled," says Kurtz Lansing. "She wrote to an American art magazine in the early 1920s, saying she had 23 shows that year. That was a surprise — how much she was putting herself out there, all the time."
"She didn't marry until late in life. In her late 40s, she married Frederick Van Wyck, a widow who was 15 years older," Larkin adds. "For many aspiring women artists of her time, marriage was pretty much the end of their careers, so that was unusual. (Yet) she continued to paint up until the last 10 years of her life, when her eyesight began to fail."
More than 50 works by Browne are in the show, divided by animals, still lifes of flowers, and gardens. Also on view are paintings recently acquired by the museum inspired by a trip Browne took to Puerto Rico in 1912.
Larkin points to "The Last Load," ca. 1899, as a painting that reveals Browne's expert knowledge of animal anatomy.
"It won the Dodge Prize for the best picture painted by a woman, given once a year in the U.S.," Larkin says. "You can see the very different treatments of the animals and the surroundings. The oxen are very tightly painted with invisible brush strokes, whereas the grass and hay falling off the wagon are rendered in quick, loose strokes that reveal the influence of Impressionism."
"In the Garden" is unusual in that most of Browne's garden paintings don't include figures, says Larkin.
"This one is a real groundbreaker because, instead of painting a woman as a beautiful young thing, typical of American Impressionist paintings of women in the garden, she is gray-haired," Larkin points out.
Among Browne's Tonalist paintings are "Cornfield Point," ca. 1910, which depicts pastureland illuminated by a full moon. Browne believed it was one of her finest canvases, along with "Saltbox by Moonlight" (no date), which she painted to demonstrate to a student how to create nocturnal light effects — described by Larkin as "the cool, bluish light of the moon and the warm glowing light of the lamps/candles indoors."
A painting that had personal meaning to Browne is "Yellow House with Yellow Roses" (after 1918).
"She owned this house on Lyme Street from 1918 to 1922 and then sold it to her sister," Larkin says. "She put down roots here in Old Lyme even while maintaining two houses in Greenwich. She seems to have been of comfortable means, although she worked as if her next meal depended on it."
If you go
What: "Matilda Browne: Idylls of Farm and Garden"
Where: Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme St., Old Lyme
When: Through May 28; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. and 1-5 p.m. Sun.
How much: $10 adults, $9 seniors, $8 students, free for ages 12 and under
Good to know: To complement the Browne exhibition, "Beasts & Best Friends: Animals of the Lyme Art Colony" is on view in an adjacent gallery, showcasing about 30 works of farm and domestic animals from the museum's permanent collection
For more information: (860) 434-5542, florencegriswoldmuseum.org
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