Arts & Leisure
Harrison Bird Brown Retrospective at Portland Museum of Art
By Rose Safran
PORTLAND - This is, perhaps, a long overdue tribute to one of Portland's important painters, a man whose paintings sold well during most of his productive lifetime and whose legacy involves the history of art in Maine's most important city.
That legacy includes, in 1882, the founding of the Portland Museum of Art (PMA), formerly known as the Portland Society of Art, where Harrison Bird Brown curated its first exhibition, borrowing works of art from prominent artists.
One of the earliest contributors of paintings to the museum's exhibitions, the Portland native, although not the quintessential 19th-century Maine painter - for Winslow Homer securely occupies that special niche - made, through his art, important statements that broadened general awareness of the northernmost pocket of the eastern United States and, on the other hand, brought visions of Europe and other places back to his native city.
Today, the PMA owns a significant collection of his works, which is on view, along with several important loans, in the ongoing exhibition entitled, "Vividly True to Nature: Harrison Bird Brown, 1832-1915."
The exhibition will surprise many - even those familiar with many of the artist's works - which, for the most part, reflect a romantic, if not sometimes exaggerated, view of a portion of New England's extraordinary topography, in particular along Maine's vast coastline. At Barridoff Galleries annual summer auctions in Portland, where over 100 of his paintings have surfaced and found customers, Brown landscapes are almost a staple and are sought after by collectors, as well as museums including the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
The Harrison Bird Brown view most of us are familiar with, is of White Head, the Cushing Island promontory depicted with a splashing surf crashing against its giant jagged cliffs, a location that the artist understood in all kinds of weather, for he maintained a home and studio on this Casco Bay island. And while both titled and untitled images of Cushing Island along with other marine paintings appear here, the exhibition is an eye-opener concerning the scope of the artist's work which goes beyond the Casco Bay area where in addition to Cushing Island other places including Diamond Cove on Great Diamond Island, Portland Harbor and Great Chebeague Island receive attention. Among the many Maine landscapes, locales farther from home include the shore at Kennebunkport near Blowing Cove, the Saco River and Mt. Desert Island views.
Seeking subjects, the artist traveled even farther from his Maine city. In 1867 he painted "Nova Scotia Headlands." In 1870, New Brunswick became the setting where his skill in handling maritime subjects was engaged in "Camping off Grand Manan with the W. H. Pratt of Boston Offshore," which shows a camping party seemingly unaware of the threat of an impending storm.
Too, the artist traveled to the White Mountains where he produced views of Franconia Notch and Mount Washington, including an 1880 one of Tuckerman's Ravine - a most dramatic oil painting, rendered with diminutive figures on the road below, and above a dense evergreen forest almost forbidding entry to the vast snow bowl beyond. This major painting is a gift to the museum, which was recently conserved for this exhibition and is on view for the first time.
In other Brown paintings of New Hampshire we see railroad tracks that appear carved into the raw countryside at a time when the area was, through them, opening up to summer tourists and travelers. His work, along with that of other artists prominent in those early days of New England tourism, was designed and reproduced by lithography to encourage visitors; as such, it often presented a somewhat more grandiose aspect than reality, perhaps to compete with the challenge of the West where loftier peaks were beckoning.
While the artist presented himself primarily as a landscape painter, the scope we enjoy here is larger. Among the artist's paintings are house portraits requested by prominent citizens; these include the J. B. Coyle house in Portland's Back Cove neighborhood, which was painted before 1861. In the early 1880s he painted the F. O. J. Smith house in Portland, which has a somewhat abandoned look as well as the Benjamin Homestead in Livermore and the Norlands Homestead also in Livermore - today a museum with little cleared land, in fact, considerable overgrowth in its surrounding landscape. In general, these were not "close-up" portraits, but houses set in a tamed, quiet landscape depicting the surrounding countryside at that time.
In the 1870ss and again in the 1880s the artist traveled abroad; he made sketches in England, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, some of which are on view here in his sketchbooks. His paintings of European areas reflected an interest in decaying ruins, principally Roman ones, in romantic settings, created at a time when there was considerable interest in classical antiquity that was fast disappearing.
Contributions by citizen Brown to the city of Portland also include director of the Portland Public Library, where he was responsible for the institution's purchase of art books, and participation in the campaign to secure the Monument Square Civil War Memorial.
The artist died in London in 1915, where he had lived with his daughter - other members of his family had died - during the final years of his life.
The Harrison Bird Brown exhibit will remain on view at the Portland Museum of Art through Sept. 9.
