TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover Story: Miniatures on Exhibit

Currently Showing/Coming Soon

First Saturday Tour

Saturday Speaker Series

Out in the Gardens: Magnolias

Tips from Kip: Container Gardens

Emily on Education

Voices from the Archives:
Eugene Allen

From the Library: On Gardens

Featured Artist:
Charles Willson Peale

Featured Artwork:
Thomas Jefferson

Did You Know?

From the Vaults

How They Saw It Then

Worth the Trip

Worth Quoting

Norton Information

Exquisite Miniatures on Exhibit

We are delighted to welcome the return of Wes and Rachelle Siegrist, the husband-and-wife team of miniaturists from Townsend, Tennessee. We’ve included their works in earlier exhibitions. Now, we’re proud to host Under the Magnifying Glass: Fifty Miniatures by Wes & Rachelle Siegrist, May 4 through July 25.

On June 12 the artists, along with Dr. David J. Wagner, curator of the exhibit, will present a lecture, “Nature in Art History”. Immediately afterward, the Siegrists will conduct a special tour of the exhibit, then sign copies of their book, Exquisite Miniatures, ($24.95).

“We’re thrilled the Siegrists are returning to the Norton,” comments Jerry Bloomer, director of public relations. “Visitors loved their paintings that we included in previous exhibitions. Their work in miniature certainly fits in well here, where we exhibit our own collection of miniatures dating to the eighteenth century.”

“I hope visitors will find that our exhibit is a good example that miniature art is alive and well and dramatically different from much of what is labeled ‘miniature’ in the world today,” Wes says.

Only steps from their studio in Townsend, Tennessee, as well as across the nation and on other continents, the husband-and-wife team travel to capture images of man, woman, animal, and landscape. They paint in detail nearly as exacting as the camera’s eye.

The Siegrists love nature, animals, and whimsy. Along with admiring the colors, tone, and brushwork, visitors may also chuckle at such works as Another Day at the Spa, depicting a warthog in a puddle, and Nude Reclining at the Bath, in which an elephant cow revels in her muddy wallow.

The couple stays within the required measurements for the works on display (twenty-five square inches or less with subjects one-sixth of life-size or less) by which the Miniature Artists of America defines a miniature. All of their art fit into an open hand regardless of the real size of subjects—elephant, pig, dog, bird or bee. Rachelle’s The Beautiful Beast of Borneo, in which an orangutan stares intently back at the viewer, is the largest painting in the exhibition, measuring 4 ½ x 3 ½ inches. In Macy, she portrays the head of a Chihuahua on a circular surface only 1¼ of an inch.

The Siegrists travel around the world for subjects, but also find them outside their window in their East Tennessee home and studio. In Signs of Spring, a female house sparrow perches on a redbud right outside their window. A few miles away in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Wes captures the simplicity, serenity, and dignity of a rural house of worship in The Little Country Church.

Visitors will lean closely to works such as The Road Home in which a pick-up truck moves along open highway beneath tall, red and rocky bluffs and a spreading western sky. Rachelle’s exacting and patient brushwork separates blades of roadside grass, each no larger in width than an eyelash.

“No,” says Wes, “she didn’t paint the grass with the apocryphal ‘one-bristle brush’ many believe miniaturists wield. Water-based mediums like ours require sufficient bristles to maintain the moisture in the brush to keep the paint wet from palette to the art surface,” he says. “In fact, we prefer as large a brush as comfortably possible. It needs to come to a needle-sharp point, so we tend to wear through brushes quickly.”

Working mostly with the naked eye, aided by reading glasses, the Siegrists also often view their subjects enlarged which “helps us to be extra patient to achieve the level of refinement we seek,” Wes says. They complete many miniatures in two to four days, although some take two to three weeks.

Paint that dries before a picture is finished is one large burden in works so small. The detail in a subject’s eye can be so minute that the tiny amount of paint required may dry before the artist can touch brush again to canvas.

Together, the couple learned the challenges and joys of miniature art. Rachelle, a Florida native, married Wes, a native of Indiana, after becoming acquainted with him and taking a class he was teaching at Highlands Museum of the Arts in Sebring, Florida. They spent a decade in “conventional-sized” art before taking up miniatures full-time in 1997.

Their creations fit in well at the museum, with its displays of seven centuries of art. Among them is the Norton’s own collection of sixty-six miniatures, dating from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries. These small, compact portraits, painted mostly on ivory, include several early presidents, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and other famous Americans, along with a self-portrait of one of America’s most noted miniaturists, Sarah Goodridge.

Although the spread of photography greatly diminished the miniaturists’ world by the mid-19th century, two revivals enhanced the genre’s popularity—one in the late 19th century, the other in the 1970s. In 1985, the Miniature Artists of America was formed, dedicated to set standards and to honor outstanding artists in the field.

The two artists’ list of awards certainly would not fit on a miniature canvas. Among them, they won first place in a birds and animals category at the 35th annual International Miniature Art Show in Tarpon Springs, Florida, in January 2010. Last May they took second place at the International Miniature Art Show in Nags Head, North Carolina.

“We trust visitors will feel a sense of wonderment in examining the works closely, but also that they will consider the paintings as gems of fine art and not just feats of technical ability and patience,” Rachelle remarks.

The exhibit is produced by David J. Wagner, L.L.C. and Ph.D.—curator and tour director.

--Gary D. Ford, Staff Writer

Currently Showing

Alex Dzigurski:
Poet of Land and Sea
April 27 - August 1, 2010

If you’ve long admired the two works in our permanent collection by seascape artist Alexander Dzigurski, you’ll love our special exclusive exhibit coming April 27. Alex Dzigurski (1911-1995): Poet of the Land and Sea showcases eighteen paintings representative of the artists’ work. Dzigurski painted for more than sixty years. While his body of work documents his journey from Serbia to America, it also reflects his passion both for his native land as well as for America--a haven of peace for an artist, his art, and his family. Some have likened his work to the soaring strings of symphony, with Dzigurski using his brush like a conductor’s baton. His subjects include the deep, blue fjords of Norway, the walled city of Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast, the soar of Glacier National Park, and other mountains, shorelines, and shrines found throughout Europe and America. “He was such a great, gregarious person,” Alex Dzigurski II, of Mountain View California, an artist in his own right, comments of his father. “He loved this country very much. He was joyful about what he did. That desire and passion comes through in his work.”

--Gary D. Ford, Staff Writer

My Darlings

Under the Magnifying Glass:
Fifty Miniatures by Wes and Rachelle Siegrist
May 4 - July 25, 2010

This husband-and-wife team from Townsend, Tennessee, has captured the attention of viewers not with large canvas but with miniature paintings. So exquisitely crafted the Siegrists' works are often mistaken for tiny photographs; they usually measure less than nine square inches. Previously, the Norton has included the Siegrists' works in four earlier exhibitions: Art and the Animal, Art of the Rainforest, Blossom - Art of Flowers, and Paws and Reflect: Art of Canines.

Coming Soon

Ansel Adams:
The Masterworks
August 17 - December 31, 2010

In his later years, Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984) chose a selection of his photographs that he felt represented the best of his life’s work. Called “The Museum Set”, the collection reveals the importance he placed on the drama and splendor of natural environments that might not have otherwise revealed their secrets to the casual passer-by. These forty-seven photographs represent a substantial portion of that collection. This is the third exhibition of Adams’s photographs the Norton has featured.

spoons are displayed among forty-three pieces of colonial silver from smiths in cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Charleston. After the Revolutionary War, Revere also opened an iron and brass foundry, and, among other things, cast bells for the young republic. One, cast in copper alloy, was meant for a Plymouth, Massachusetts, Baptist church that unfortunately burned. This Revere Bell rests now in the sunny corridor linking the museum’s south wing.

Near the Revere silver stands an equally large case exhibiting thematic collections of 19th-century pressed glass from Gillinder Glass and Corning Glass Company.

Elsewhere, tour participants will “ooh” and “ahh” over displays of 203 pieces of Steuben glass. They include plates hand-etched in reproductions of bird paintings found in John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, of which the museum owns a double elephant folio first edition. Porcelain lovers won’t be disappointed. One small room blue, cream, and many other colors gleam in Josiah Wedgwood’s creations of Jasperware and Majolica. Elsewhere, sixteen statues of the North American Indian series, created by the Cybis Porcelain studio of Trenton, New Jersey, depict tribes of Native Americans.

--Gary D. Ford, Staff Writer

The Norton may be one of the few museums in the world with its own bees making honey. Meanwhile, the bees also buzz around the botanical gardens helping spread blooming beauty.

William Hummer, owner of Hummer & Son of Bossier City, recently installed the Norton apiary with four colonies. On May 22 he will explain the sweet life of honey in “Busy as Bees,” this month’s Saturday Speaker presentation.

William (the “son” in the name of the business) title, along with his late father, Stanley, started the business from a 4-H beekeeping in 1985. William returned to Bossier City after earning degrees at Louisiana State University in 1966, and helped grow the business. Each year Hummer & Son produces and packages more than 50,000 pounds of pure Louisiana honey, flavored with clover, rattan, pepper vine, aster, and other small, blooming flora.

William’s presentation will discuss the four colonies that form the Norton apiary, located within easy view beside the glass corridor leading to the museum’s north wing. Visitors may see hundreds of drones swarming around their colonies, and taking off to work in the gardens, where they help with the pollination of plants.

--Gary D. Ford, Staff Writer

All of us at the botanical gardens look forward to May, when our Southern magnolias burst into bloom. These creamy, white blossoms (the official state flower of both Louisiana and Mississippi) float like fine china teacups and saucers on tablecloths of stiff, shiny green leaves.

We sniff their citronella scent, and also get a whiff of Southern legend, lore, and yes, stereotype. Some Southerners see magnolias and think moonlight, moss, and rustling crinoline. The reality, however, is much better. Think furniture, food, even medicine.

As early as 1,000 A.D. Chinese stripped magnolia bark for medicine (called Hou Pou) to treat several ailments, including abdominal pain. Southern artisans have used magnolia for making furniture, such as chairs and rockers as well as blinds, boxes, sashes, and doors. Animals such as squirrels, opossums, along with turkeys and other birds feed on its red-colored fruit, set in an aggregate (also called a burr or cone) ovoid in shape.

We grow five of the trees from the family Magnoliale in our botanical gardens. They include Magnolia grandiflora, or Southern magnolia, the largest; Magnolia virginiana, or sweetbay magnolia; Magnolia acuminata or “yellow bird”; Magnolia macrophylla, or Ashe magnolia; Magnolia liliflora, or the “Little Girl” hybrids; and “Little Gem,” a cultivar of the grandiflora.

Most visitors see our “Little Gems” first. Last year we re-designed our walkway entrance to the front door of the museum by lining it with twelve “Little Gems,” all about fourteen- to sixteen-feet tall. We like their elegant look, full shaping, and floral beauty as a cheerful introduction to our art inside. Our “Little Gems” should grow only to about twenty to twenty-five feet high, but they bloom their little hearts out. We hope we’ll see some this first year.

Steed’s Nursery in Candor, North Carolina, cultivated this smaller version of the grandiflora in 1952. They fit into most sizes of gardens, as do the sweetbay, also called swampbay, for their presence in watery areas. They grow to heights of 60 feet, with globular blossoms two to three inches in width. You’ll see ours by the bridge on the north side of the pond.

Native to the southeastern states like its larger kin, Magnolia grandiflora, sweetbays flourish from coastal edges of North Carolina into East Texas and Arkansas. They like water, and usually are found in the wild with trees of kindred spirit, such as water oak and black tupelo, often atop hummocks as well as in wooded floodplains.

We’ve also added “The Little Girl” hybrids to our magnolia family. “Betty,” “Jane,” and “Ann” are crosses between Magnolia liliflora and Magnolia stellata, better known as Star Magnolia. They have beautiful, dark pink and purple blooms in spring, before the leaves appear.

Ashe magnolia is another of moderate size, rarely growing to twenty feet. They stretch horizontally, however, about that same size. They sport beautiful white blossoms with purplish stains at the feet of their nine petals.

Our “Yellow Bird” magnolia, also called “cucumber tree,” blooms about the same time as the azaleas in spring. Visitors delight in stumbling across them, and exclaim over the pretty, pale yellow blooms. These tulip magnolias, now fairly small and only about six feet tall, bloom in our native area on the north end of the gardens. They’re native to Louisiana, as well as to Texas, Oklahoma, and the piedmont and mountains of the southeastern states.

The aristocrat of the garden, however, is the Southern magnolia. This evergreen may reach a venerable eighty feet in height, with a spread of forty to sixty feet. Its leathery leaves grow four to eight inches long, with blossoms of six to twelve petals reaching ten inches across.

What would become known as the Southern magnolia stunned early European visitors on American shores. From the southeast, where he found it, British naturalist Mark Catesby (we have one of his books in the museum) brought specimens to Great Britain in 1726. French collectors took home specimens from along the Mississippi River, right here in Louisiana. Europeans also collected the sweetbay, and propagated it and the Southern magnolia in their gardens.

These largest magnolias make beautiful additions to spacious landscapes, but bear in mind their habits and upkeep. Although they’re drought-tolerant, they’re coy, and slow to show their blooms. You may be tapping your toes ten years before a bloom peeks a white cheek out from the green leaves.

Then you have to sweep up after them when they drop leaves, blooms, and burrs. Watch out for the roots that rise above ground. One false move and they’ll trip you up. You’ll hit the dirt, literally. Forget about growing grass under the thick, wide canopies.

To blend stereotype with reality, and fancy with fact, go ahead and think of magnolias as high-maintenance belles. They take their sweet time in blooming, demand attention, and make a mess. Sometimes, you’ll wish you’d never planted one. But, oh my, are they beautiful. When I see their shiny, green leaves and white blooms the size of bridal bouquets, I’m glad I live in Louisiana.

--Kip Dehart, Landscape Director

I like to call it “garden in a glance.” Planting a container can be as easy as tossing some seeds into soil, or sitting down with paper and pencil and planning these micro gardens. Even when you have a large area for growing, containers add interest to a window ledge, and bring color to decks, porches, patios, or other spaces to small for a larger garden. Remember, too, that containers are also moveable feasts for the eyes. You can re-arrange containers to take advantage of shade or sun.

They also break up long spans of walls. Stand near our parking lot and look at the back of our building near the roofline. We added those thirteen planters that add texture and color to a long, flat wall.

To grow a container garden, follow these steps:

Dirt comes first. You’ll need good potting mix. (Be careful, and don’t use potting soil or dirt from your garden.) Many commercial mixes are available; just remember to add peat moss or compost to retain moisture, line it with a plastic bag, pour in a layer of pebbles in the bottom, and punch a hole or two for water release.

Choose your container. Terra cotta pots are good for holding the sun’s warmth. Stone containers add an air of dignity and strength. If you choose large stone containers, go to the gym first and build muscle, or choose smaller, lighter, easier-to-move containers. Wooden troughs or baskets add an air of antiquity, but you’ll need to treat the wood with a plant-proof preserver. For any container, you’ll also need to line it with a plastic bag, with holes for water.

Upright, Mounding, Trailing. Use those words to guide you in plant selection. You’ll want trailing plants around the edges, mounding plants in the middle, and a colorful backbone of upright plants. To choose your flowers, you may copy our containers along our back wall, if you plan yours to get lots of sun. We’ve filled our high container gardens with sweet potato vine, rosemary, penta, and sun coleus. The sweet potato vine grows quickly, with leaves that drape along the container edges with colors of purple, golden green, or green with pink and white variegations. Sun coleus, which are newer varieties propagated by cuttings rather than grown from seed, offer a great range of color, leaf shapes, and growing habits. Want your garden fluttering with butterflies? They love pentas, which may grow two-to three-feet tall and feature four-inch wide clusters of lavender, pink, red, and white flowers. Cut them for indoor arrangements that may last for two weeks. Rosemary also thrives in sun as well as serving as an antidote to deer, who sniff it and move on. Many varieties feature blue flowers. I like Arp, discovered in Arp, Texas, with its dark green foliage and medium blue flowers.

Liriope

What about partial and full shade? Choose impatiens, begonias, caladiums, coleus, hostas, and liriope. Impatiens sultana does well in shade, and even in full sun if watered almost daily. Many varieties of begonias bloom from spring to fall. Liriope provides graceful, grass-like leaves and foliage in tall spikes of purple, pink, blue, lavender and white. Hostas give you shades of green, while caladiums produce large leaves like arrow-shaped canvases for colors in pink, rose, red, white, silver, green, and bronze. Coleus, in so many shapes and shades, let you choose your palette to fill in colors in your containers.

Don’t forget the water. In shade or sun, watch your container carefully to give it proper moisture.

--Kip Dehart, Landscape Director

examined the art closely, read text box information, and even asked questions of our knowledgeable guards. I was most surprised at the lists they compiled. They discovered dozens of materials as they explored the museum! For another requirement they had to observe how elements of design are used in art. The boys studied lines, shapes, perspective, and space. As they viewed A.D.M. Cooper’s Trail of Yesterday we talked about texture. They were able to see an incredible example of Cooper’s work in impasto--thickly applied paint that stands out from the picture. After gathering in the Oval Gallery for a painting activity, the boys helped gather up supplies before dismissing.

The South Highlands’ Webelo Troop has completed two badges at the Gallery: the Art Badge and the Scholar Badge. I am in the process of looking over the requirements for additional badges to add to our “list.” Who knows? Perhaps in 2110, we’ll be celebrating another century of scouting here at the Norton!

--Emily Meyers, Education Director

Mr. Allen grew up in Minden, Louisiana, where he was working in the family’s dry cleaning business when World War II began. A sergeant major, he was in Belgium with the 450th Bombardment Squadron, 322nd Bombardment Group, when Germany surrendered. In the streets, he recalls, joy reigned.

ALLEN: I was in Belgium in a children’s home where we were stationed. When the war ended, everybody left that base and went into Brussels. The streets were so crowded you couldn’t walk through. Everybody was grabbing you and hugging you. I’ve never been kissed so much in my life. I guess for a week or two weeks we didn’t even have enough men in the children’s home, where we were staying, to have a roll call. Everybody was gone. But they did haul back about five truck loads of girls back to Brussels. They finally rounded them up. Most of them were wearing GI clothes.

Mr. Allen returned to Minden after the war and ran the family business. He is among nearly 500 men and women from the Shreveport area who graciously gave their time to tell us their life stories of service and sacrifice. We’re presenting these stories as part of our Oral History Project, an ongoing effort to interview veterans of conflicts from World War II to the present. We also continue to collect interviews from many citizens, including eyewitnesses to the civil rights struggle, pioneers of the energy industries, and those who created “the Shreveport sound” in music.

Click here to view additional photographs and to listen to the audio of the interview with Mr. Allen. If you or someone you know would like to share stories with us, please call (318) 865-4201, or contact ohp@rwnaf.org.

--Gary Ford, Staff Writer

To qualify as a miniature, a book must not exceed three inches in height, width, or thickness. Popular for centuries, the oldest known miniature volumes are two, tiny 4,000-year-old clay tablets. Miniature books as we know them first grew fashionable during the Renaissance. They have remained so favored because they are easy for travelers to carry his or her own small library for reading while on the road. Napoleon, for instance, was said to have traveled with a library of forty-nine miniature volumes, contained in a single leather-covered box called the Bibliotheque Portative du Voyageur, which accompanied him on military campaigns. Well-made miniature books are surprisingly legible and usually as finely made (if not more so) than their full-sized brethren. For instance, On Gardens is bound in fine Moroccan leather with gilt lettering. Some miniatures actually boast jeweled covers, or designs crafted from gold and silver filigree, tortoise shell, cloisonné, and other forms of decorative arts, including even detailed works of art in miniature. In Bryce’s Thumb English Dictionary, a 368-page miniature printed in the 1880s, a detailed portrait of Samuel Johnson measures only an inch square. For two hundred years, the smallest miniature ever produced was a 1674 book entitled Bloem-Hofje, which was described as the size of a fingernail. However, this was bested in 1985 by a nursery rhyme, Old King Cole, published by Glennifer Press of Scotland in a book an amazing one twenty-fifth of a square inch. Its pages can only be turned with the aid of a needle.

Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban (1561 – 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, and author. While his political career had its ups and downs, he remains justly famous for having established and popularized deductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, now known as the Baconian method, or more usually, simply as the scientific method. Popular in the court of Queen Elizabeth I (rumors of the day suggested he was the illegitimate son of Elizabeth and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, one of the Queen’s long-time favorites), he also served as Lord Chancellor under James I. His political career, however, ended in disgrace when he was charged with financial corruption in 1621. Some attributed this to his marriage; when he was forty-five, he wed the fourteen-year old Alice Barnham who apparently expected a certain expansive lifestyle. He later cut her out of his will. Throughout his life, Bacon devoted himself to both philosophic and scientific inquiry, writing a host of influential essays on various topics. Among these was “On Gardens”, which posited the perfect garden arrangement in terms of both botany and visual splendor. Obviously intended for wealthy patrons, the garden was designed to cover thirty acres at the center of an estate, with beds of plants that would generate flowers throughout all four seasons. Certain sections were developed as lawns, others for hedges and allées, and still others devoted to water features. One area was set aside to appear “wild”; as Bacon put it, “Trees I would have none in it, but some Thickets made only of Sweetbriar, and Honeysuckle, and some Wild Vine amongst; and the Ground set with Violets, Strawberries, and Primroses. For these in Wild Heaths to be set, some of Wild Thyme; some with Pinks; some with Germander, that gives a good Flower to the Eye . . .”

Bacon died of pneumonia after experimenting with the use of snow to preserve meat. At his April 1626 funeral, thirty of the greatest minds of his century gave eulogies for him, which were later published in one volume in 1730.

Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667), whose last name is pronounced Cooley, was one of the Cavalier poets. In his own time, he was considered a superior poet to John Milton, his contemporary. Posterity has reversed that status, however, and today Cowley is far better known for his many fine essays. A child prodigy, he published his first volume of poetry when only fifteen and had written both a pastoral drama and a Latin comedy for the stage by age twenty. During the English Civil War, he sided with the monarchy and went into exile in France with Queen Henrietta Maria in 1644, serving as her secretary, while continuing to write. Though he returned to England in 1654, his views had not changed. He was initially imprisoned, yet after his release, apparently worked as Royalist spy. He also studied medicine at Oxford (having previously received his M.A. from Cambridge) and became an M.D. in 1657. After the Restoration, the queen gave him an estate where he lived in retirement, writing essays and studying botany. His stature as a poet at the time of his death was such that he was buried at Westminster Abbey alongside Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser.

--Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections

John Penn,
by Charles Willson Peale

In 1776, Peale moved to Philadelphia to paint portraits of the men engaged in forming a new nation. He also raised troops for the Revolutionary War, attained the rank of captain in the Pennsylvania militia by 1777, and participated in several battles. Between engagements, he produced a number of miniature portraits of his fellow officers in the Continental Army. Of all his wartime paintings, the most well known are those of George Washington. In 1772 the future President settled down for his first of seven sittings for Peale, who would use works from those sessions to produce nearly sixty portraits of the founder. One sold in 2005 for $21.3 million dollars, setting a record at that time for the highest price paid for an American portrait. So devoted was Peale to his creative passion that he named all his children after famous artists and encouraged them to follow artistic careers. They included his sons Raphaelle (1774-1825), Rembrandt (1778-1860), Rubens (1784-1865), Titian (1799-1885), and daughters Angelica Kauffman Peale (1775-1853) and Elizabeth de Peyster Peale (1802-1857). In all, he had sixteen children with three wives. Almost all of those who survived childhood worked in art in some fashion or another.

However, a “Renaissance man” like so many of the Founding Fathers, Peale didn’t confine his achievements to art. He was also successful in fields including carpentry, dentistry, optometry, shoemaking, taxidermy, writing (producing several books), politics, and science. He organized the first U.S. scientific expedition in 1801 and founded the first museum in America, initially called the Philadelphia Museum, but later renamed the Peale Museum. It housed a large and diverse collection of botanical, biological, and archaeological specimens, many of which he had acquired in the field. Among its “firsts” were the initial display of North American mastodon bones and the first museum use in America of Linnaean taxonomy. Unfortunately, it eventually failed, business being one of the few areas in which he didn’t excel, and after his death its contents were sold off to several entrepreneurs, including P.T. Barnum.

Charles Willson Peale died February 22, 1827 at his home in Germantown, Maryland. He was a remarkable man and a giant in American history. The inscription on his tombstone sums up his life succinctly in what he found most important: He participated in the Revolutionary struggle for independence . . . As an artist contributed to the history of his country . . . Was an energetic citizen and patriot, and in private life, beloved by all who knew him.

--Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections

Thomas Jefferson
by William Birch

English miniaturist William Birch (1755-1835) painted this portrait of Founding Father and third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson. Birch, who moved to America around 1794, was allowed a personal visit with Jefferson to paint him, while the Virginian was serving as Vice President under John Adams. This first work is in the form of an enamel piece, rather like a cameo. When he later decided to do a miniature of Jefferson, he based it on the cameo rather than attempting to convince Jefferson to sit for a more life-like portrait. Instead, Birch developed the entire miniature into a type of allegory, including a number of symbols reflective of Jefferson’s career.

A somewhat odd-shaped object in the middle of the sun in the top right-hand corner is a liberty cap. Its presence in the sun represents the light of liberty abolishing the demons of injustice. Thus, the rays of the sun pass through Jefferson and beat down on a fork-tailed figure and serpent head in the lower

left, which represent injustice and tyranny. Symbolic imagery of this kind was common during this period of American history, and many portrait miniatures in the Norton’s collection are based on enamels or medals bearing the image of the subject, rather than portraits done from life. Birch was also a well-known engraver, producing a series of twenty-eight engravings known as Views of Philadelphia. He remains perhaps best known, however, as the father of Thomas Birch. Seven years old when he came to America with his father, Thomas Birch (1779-1851) went on to become one of the most successful early landscape and marine artists in America. His painting Winter Scene with Sleighing Party is on permanent display in the Norton’s American Art History Galleries.

--Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections

Self Portrait, Sarah Goodridge

The first nude American portrait was a self-portrait by a female artist. The remarkable Sarah Goodridge (a self-portrait miniature of the artist wearing clothes is in our permanent collection and on display in our American Art History Galleries) was completely self-taught. She didn’t even come from a well-to-do family. Goodridge was born the sixth of nine children in a small village in Massachusetts in 1788. While growing up in the country, she came across a book on drawing and painting and taught herself to draw by scratching pictures with a pin on birch bark. After the death of her father, she and her family made their way to Boston where she was able to obtain a few lessons from popular portraitist Gilbert Stuart and began earning a living by painting miniature portraits. These proved very popular, and she soon flourished as an independent artist, rare for anyone in early America and especially for a woman. Her work was extremely detailed and realistic, including even the tiny wrinkles around the eyes of her sitters. By 1830, Goodridge was a leading miniaturist, completing up to two portraits a week and supporting her sick mother, her orphaned niece, and an ever-changing array of other family members. She herself never married.

However, she developed a special friendship with Boston lawyer and politician Daniel Webster, who was married with three children the first time she painted his portrait. He sat for twelve more portraits over the next 25 years. They also wrote each other frequently; while she carefully preserved his letters to her, he equally carefully destroyed hers to him. After Webster’s first wife died in 1827, Goodridge secretly painted a daring miniature for her beloved. This “portrait” of her bare breasts begins just below her chin and ends just below her breasts, so she would remain anonymous to the casual viewer. She called it Beauty Revealed. The great 20th century writer and critic John Updike has termed it “the first known nude American portrait done from life.”

Despite the obvious implication of her gift to him, Webster was an ambitious man who needed money for political campaigns; he married another woman whose sole interest for him seemed to be the fact that she was from a wealthy and prominent family. When Goodridge died, she left Webster her most beloved object – her paint box. As for Beauty Revealed– Webster kept it hidden among his personal effects until the day he died. Today it resides in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

--Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections

bathed his figures in light, using strong shades of the head and on a diagonal from the shoulders down, while creating light-charged tones around the face itself. Enormously successful with this new technique, Malbone soon began receiving commissions that took him to New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In 1801, he made a trip to London with fellow artist Washington Allston. There he adapted elements of the styles of artists he admired at the Royal Academy of Arts. Washes of watercolor to emphasize the luminosity of the ivory background appeared in his work, as well as backgrounds of blue sky and clouds. By December of 1803, his mature style was evident. He highlighted his sitters against a pale, lightly washed and hatched background creating a feigned landscape that began at the sitter’s shoulders and covered the lower third of the portrait in pale shades of turquoise and mauve, an entirely individual choice. In this mode he painted Eliza Livingston, 1806. Unfortunately, Malbone was approaching the end of his brief life. Searching for a more salubrious climate, he sailed for Jamaica in November of 1806, but finding it a dismal place, took refuge at a cousin’s home in Savannah in January of 1807. There he died of consumption on May 7, 1807 at the age of twenty-nine. Though his professional career had spanned only a dozen years, his fame and reputation was so thoroughly established that almost three decades after his death, Richard Morrell Staigg, an English artist from Leeds, immigrated to Newport and made a career out of imitating Malbone’s style.

--Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections

Gilbert Stuart by W. Dunlap

View from White Top Mountain

from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”, as Thomas Gray might express it.

For those who enjoy more populated paths, Abingdon has those, too. On another lovely spring day, we took my host’s two dogs for a companionable walk along the Virginia Creeper Trail. Transformed from its original role as a railroad line, the trail now runs through the countryside in and around Abingdon, attracting hikers and bike and horse riders alike. In fact, local bike rental outlets will actually haul bicycles to the higher parts of the trail near White Top, so that the less strenuously inclined among us can ride downhill all the way back into town.

Scenic walks abound in Abingdon, including the one down its historic Main Street. Lined with charming antique shops and small art galleries, this thoroughfare also boasts a number of houses, churches, and commercial buildings on the Registry of Historic Places, some of them dating all the way back to Abingdon’s incorporation in 1778. One of the most delightful of these is still called simply “the Tavern”. Originally established in 1779, it has been serving delicious food and drink to discerning guests ever since. Just be sure to make a reservation; like all good inns, this one enjoys a regular clientele that keep its seats filled. Also on Main Street is the nationally known Barter Theatre, where you can watch first-class drama in the evening and shop in the memorabilia-rich gift shop during the day. And if your day proves stressful, the Martha Washington Hotel and Spa offers a relaxing getaway in a delightful historic setting. No, Martha never slept there, but if she’d known what it’s like, she’d wish she had.

Naturally, I never go anywhere without visiting the local art museum and that was true in Abingdon as well. The William King Museum, a partner of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, includes a sculpture garden, art education programs, working artists’ studios, and an historic house museum, in addition to historic and contemporary exhibitions which change every three to six months. I found an intriguing contrast in their current exhibitions: An Educated Woman: Art from Girls’ Schools and Women’s Colleges and Cohabitants: New Works by Heide Trepanier and David Mazure. The first explores the tradition of both ornamental and fine arts instruction in women’s education. As W.S. Neighbors, the president of Sullins College in Bristol, Virginia in the 1910s, wrote, “Should our daughters study art? Yes, and upon a larger scale than boys; they are to build up and beautify our homes.” The art then taught to them encompassed needlework such as samplers along with painting and drawing and later became somewhat derisively known as “schoolgirl art”.

Nevertheless, these pieces make clear that women of good family cultivated an appreciation for beauty and often demonstrated talents extending beyond their predetermined roles as wives and mothers. With the intensely personal and dramatic contemporary art of Heide Trepanier and David Mazure, the museum demonstrates just how far art has come in the past century. Both have created large-scale, mostly abstract pieces involving splatters of color and whirling and rolling forms, sometimes directly painted onto the walls of the installation. Trepanier recently received the Virginia Museum of Fine Art Professional Fellowship, and Mazure has had his work exhibited at venues around the nation while teaching at Appalachian State University and East Tennessee State University.

Because I’m always interested in local artists, my hosts also took me to two other local “art towns”, Boone and Blowing Rock, North Carolina, both only about an hour’s drive from Abingdon. Boone, home of Appalachian State University, has a booming art scene with dozens of small galleries and art cooperatives. One, a three-story affair, offered innumerable “booths” featuring artists using a diversity of styles and media, a true cornucopia for art aficionados. In addition, the town also has a number of live music and performing arts venues. My only disappointment was that it would easily take weeks, not just a few hours, to see all that Boone has to offer (well, that and the limitations of my pocketbook!). But my friends promised me that I didn’t want to miss Blowing Rock, and they were right. Another town with a large visual arts presence (as well as lovely garden and crafts shops), Blowing Rock also boasts the Bob Timberlake Gallery. The Norton has had the pleasure of featuring a one-man exhibition by Mr. Timberlake and also has two of his paintings in our permanent collection, both on display in our South Wing corridor. His gallery features not only his paintings, but also furniture and other decorative arts either designed by or featuring the work of Mr. Timberlake. Time flew far too quickly and soon we were making our way back through the lovely sunset-shaded peaks of the Blue Ridge to my friends’ charming house in Abingdon and steaks grilled on their hillside deck.

So, whether your interests run to nature, art, theatre, food, or just having a good time in beautiful surroundings, Abingdon is a great place to visit.

--Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections

FIRST SATURDAY TOURS
Regularly scheduled tours are offered on the first Saturday of every month at 2 p.m. No reservation is required for these First Saturday Tours. Groups of 10 or more are asked to call ahead so preparations may be made to accommodate the group on these particular tours. All tours, like admission to the Gallery, are free to the public. The next First Saturday Tour, The Decorative Arts Tour, will be on May 1st at 2 p.m.

GROUP TOURS
Eighteen group tours are offered at the Norton ranging from the 19th Century French Art History Tour to the Cowboy Artists Tour. Group tours are available by appointment year-round for groups of 10-30 and last approximately 45 minutes.

OUTREACH PROGRAM
The purpose of the community Outreach Program is to take art and art education to people through interactive presentations. Community Presentations consist of PowerPoint presentations to civic groups and assisted living facilities.

For more information on the programs offered or to schedule a tour or presentation, click here.

SATURDAY SPEAKER SERIES
One Saturday each month, the Norton will host a local, regional, or national expert speaking on a variety of subjects in formats ranging from formal presentations to informal seminars to walking tours. Upcoming speakers will cover a broad range of subjects including gardening, popular literature and film, influential historical and cultural figures, musical history and interpretation, and food in art. All events are free to the public. The next Saturday Speaker will be Hummer & Sons on May 22nd at 2 p,m. They will present The Busy Lives of Bees.

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
The R.W. Norton Art Foundation is pursuing interviews with those who were involved in America's effort to win World War II, whether in the military or on the home front. Each interview will be digitally recorded by the Gallery to be stored and used for historical purposes, and each interview subject will also be given a copy of this recording to share and preserve his or her memories for family and friends.

If you are interested in participating in or would like more information about the Oral History Project, please click here.

SUGGESTIONS AND IDEAS?
To offer us feedback or to suggest what you’d like to see in upcoming issues, please click here.

GALLERY LOCATION AND HOURS:
4747 Creswell Avenue
Shreveport, LA 71106
318-865-4201
www.rwnaf.org
Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday 1 to 5 p.m.
Closed Mondays and National Holidays

Copyright © 2010 by R. W. Norton Art Gallery