TW Wood Gallery

It's a good thing we forgot our umbrellas at the Three Penny Taproom in Montpelier. Retrieving them gave us another chance to visit the TW Wood Gallery, an off-the-beaten path delight which hadn't been open on Labor Day.  We arrived shortly after closing time, but Brian let us in to see "Pastel Music," an exhibition of Vermont artists hung in what looked like a school hallway.  One artist created a mosaic using chalk ends.

I'd never heard of TW Wood, who enjoyed some renown for his artistic storytelling and stewardship of the National Academy and the American Watercolor Society.  Here's a portrait of him at 68, not long before the gallery he donated to Montpelier opened.

TW Wood by Jonathan Scott Hartley (ca 1890)

 

His depiction of a nursery rhyme reminds me of Pieter Breugel the Elder, my favorite European painter.

There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe (1862)

Wood also was one of the few 19th-century American artists who painted Blacks as individuals.

White Rats (1895)

Southern Cornfield (1861)

The gallery devotes another room to Works Progress Administration artists.  The taxes of your ancestors subsidized these wonderful works.

Skyscrapers by Joseph Stella (1937)

Mountain Ranch by Charles Reiffel (1936)

We ended the afternoon with a visit to the Coburn Covered Bridge, one of around a hundred left in the state to protect river crossings from inclement weather.