MANCHESTER — There was a time in this old state when yoked oxen hauled logs out of frozen woods, people flocked to county fairs for fun, for relaxation, and to see their neighbors, farriers shoed draft horses which then competed in strength contests, wooden barns and church steeples dotted the landscape, and covered bridges hung tenuously over rushing streams.
For the most part, if you look hard enough, this is still Vermont.
But nothing has captured the old-timey feel of Vermont more than the artists who were inspired to paint here during the last century. And no one has captured more of their work than Lyman Orton of the Vermont County Store.
Orton, 82, was born and grew up in southern Vermont. His father, Vrest Orton, practically invented the market for the nostalgic image of Vermont that these pictures represent when he founded the Vermont Country Store in Weston in 1946, and when he and a few friends created Vermont Life magazine and, for a time, wrote most of its stories.
His son inherited the Vermont Country Store and built it into a nostalgia juggernaut with its mail-order operation and stores in Weston and Rockingham.
Now retired, Orton has been a passionate collector of Vermont art for decades. And for decades, his collection has hung on the walls of the Vermont Country Store office building - out of view, and, in fact, out of the awareness of anyone who didn't have reason to visit the offices.
Now Orton is making the art accessible to everyone.
"For the Love of Vermont: The Lyman Orton Collection" comprises two exhibits that run from July to early November at Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester and the Bennington Museum. Between the two museums, visitors can enjoy this collection of more than 200 paintings, prints, and drawings.
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Orton focuses his collecting on art created between roughly the turn of the last century and the 1960s, which he considers the golden age of Vermont art.
The stunning exceptions are a series of large expressionistic paintings by James Jahrsdoerfer (1953–2015), inspired by the devastation of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. You can feel the terror in the hearts of the residents as bridges are washed away and whole towns become children's toys with buildings that can be rearranged at will.
The Manchester opening on July 22 drew approximately 300 people to hear Orton talk about his collection and to meet Anita Rafael of Wardsboro, who co-wrote the companion book to the shows, also called For the Love of Vermont. The line for autographs after the show ran through two rooms and out of the building.
The first question for Orton was why he began collecting these paintings in the first place.
"Well, growing up in Weston, I was about to get married," he said. "I bought a house. Then we got married, we moved into the house. And then we realized we need some furniture."
After staking claim to some furnishings in his parents' attic down the street, "I started to go to the auctions and buy antiques, because that was what we all loved back in those days, in the '60s and '70s, and so on. And so that got me thinking about, 'Oh, there's more than just antiques here. There's art here.'"
Orton noticed that the art - Vermont scenes - was being bought by people who did not live in Vermont.
"That was the inspiration for it," he said. "We should be keeping that stuff here rather than letting it fly the coop. That was the initial idea."
Orton's collecting obsession has not ceased with time. He said he bought his latest picture a few days before the show and had it shipped to Vermont just in time to hang it on a wall.
Many of the artists in the show - mostly long gone now - were part of thriving artists colonies here in southern Vermont.
"A lot of these artists were the group that was originally known as the Dorset Painters," Rafael said. "They began doing exhibitions together, in each other's studios or in the bar next door, as early as 1904."
She called the "For the Love of Vermont" project "kind of like a reunion exhibition in a way."
"Literally 70 years ago, all the guys had their art hanging on the walls here," Rafael said.
"By the 1920s, their exhibitions were a little more organized. Sometimes, on a Sunday morning after church, they'd put their paintings out on the lawn with a stick behind them to hold them up. When people came out of church they would see and sometimes buy their paintings. Or they [would sell] them to people coming in to get the Sunday papers."
It snowballed into a point where they began to hold art shows. The first real ones were held at the Equinox Hotel in Manchester.
"Those shows were very popular and started to grow a little more," Rafael said. "And by 1936, for example, they had something like 384 paintings by 174 artists."
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The Southern Vermont Arts Center is the perfect place to view these paintings. Driving into Manchester, you can see the same mountains that were painted by Rockwell Kent (1882–1971). And looking out of the windows of the gallery, you can see pretty much the same sky and the same rolling hills that inspired these artists to leave behind such a graphic and vivid picture of life in old Vermont.
Looking deeply at "Carnival at Royalton," for example, a 1965 oil on canvas board, you feel you are at the very carnival. There's a Breughel-esque feeling of being part of country life. You can hear the excited shouts of the children as they fly past on a dangerous-looking Flying Chairs ride. The painting was done by Cecil Crosley Bell (1906–1970), one of the stars of this show.
Bell is also responsible for a thrilling painting of horses straining at a horse pull, the brown one with his head lowered in effort and the white one rearing up. "Go Boys! Go! Go!" is an oil on board he did in 1957. A third painting depicts a blacksmith shoeing another muscular horse. These were work horses, and you can feel in your bones that they are large, strong, and willing to go, go, go.
Another highly detailed country fair picture by Aldro T. Hibbard (1886–1972) became the illustration for a Maxwell House coffee advertisement. Actually, Maxwell House had a thing for Vermont back then; another painting by Luigi Lucioni (1900–1988) was used as an advertisement as well. But the Lucioni that stands out in the show - "Nestled Barns" - is of a strong set of red barns and was reportedly sold at auction in 2019 for $62,500.
Two yoked oxen skidding logs out of the woods while accompanied by an old logger with a switch whip, a 1940 oil on canvas by Leo Blake (1887–1976), seems peaceful and well-balanced for such a difficult and chilly effort. Supposedly, Blake got up early on winter mornings and traveled out to the woods with the loggers and the oxen to paint them at their work.
Covered bridges, which the tourists call quaint and the natives call convenient, are featured prominently. A delicate C. H. DeWitt (1905–1995) watercolor on paper is a standout.
There's actually a whole room of covered bridge paintings. Some are static, some don't seem to be quite tethered to the shoreline, and some you might not want to drive your car across today, but many are quite beautiful. An impressionistic Hibbard stands out.
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Some of these artists lived and died and were buried in Vermont. Others were just passing through. Some made a living as painters and/or illustrators; others did not. Covers from the now-defunct Saturday Evening Post abound.
One thing is certain: the Vermont they saw inspired them to paint, no matter what happened later to the canvas or the board.
After the talk by Orton and Rafael, many people in attendance were concerned with where the collection will go after the shows. What will happen to it?
"What you see today is a glimpse at what I hope the future will become more and more like, for particularly small museums and arts centers in Vermont, and in small cities and towns around America," Orton said. "We can't keep up with the big cities, with $80 billion buildings and budgets of God-knows-how-much extravaganzas and so on."
Will he build his own museum to house the vast collection? Rafael says that Orton has made his plans, but he will not reveal them to anyone outside his family.
Joyce Marcel, a longtime southern Vermont reporter, feature writer, and columnist, regularly reports on politics, business, and the arts for The Commons and other publications, notably Vermont Business Magazine.
This The Arts column by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.