MANCHESTER — Lyman Orton had hoped this year’s first-ever public showing of what Yankee Magazine calls “the largest private collection of 20th-century Vermont art in the world” would illuminate locals and visitors alike.
The Vermont Country Store owner wasn’t expecting just how much viewers would shed light back.
Organizers of “For the Love of Vermont: The Lyman Orton Collection” have spent years preparing to debut more than 200 historic works created in the state before drifting over the decades to such far-flung places as California.
“I started to see art get sold and go out of state,” Orton recalled in a recent interview. “I thought we ought to keep it here. And so that became my mission — bring back art that has escaped.”
Hosts at the Bennington Museum and Manchester’s Southern Vermont Arts Center dodged this summer’s flooding, only to see initial attendance dip as tourists assumed the entire state was underwater.
Then came a more welcome splash in the form of waves of raves.
“Thank you for helping me bring back so many little happy moments from my life,” one of many vocal visitors wrote. “Who knew how many memories it could conjure up?”
Or how many mysteries it could solve.
As the exhibit nears its end Nov. 5, the biggest surprise isn’t that it survived the storm. Instead, it’s the resulting deluge of response from people coast to coast and across oceans, as well as Vermonters whose recollections are adding a palette of local color and personal revelations previously unknown to curators.
‘We didn’t know where it was’
Take when Orton stopped by the Manchester center this month to pre-sign a stack of the show’s catalog — a 220-page collaboration with Wardsboro writer Anita Rafael that’s already in its second printing.
Opening the book, the 82-year-old flipped through pages featuring such works as the late Rockwell Kent’s circa 1923 “Mother and Chicks,” which pictures Sunderland’s Union Church.
“My great-grandfather helped to build it,” Orton said of the sanctuary.
When Kent and his wife Kathleen went on to divorce, she took the painting to California. Nearly a century later, Orton discovered it on the market for an “eye-popping” figure.
“We dickered over the price for a year,” Orton recalled. “We finally negotiated a deal and I was able to repatriate Kent’s painting.”
Not all of Orton’s acquisitions come with such a tidy ending. The seventh-generation Vermonter’s show and book include a postscript requesting “new, corrected or missing information” about the people and places illustrated but not necessarily identified. Since the exhibit’s opening, he and collection curator Donnel Barnum have received dozens of replies.
Orton gestured to Cecil Crosby Bell’s 1966 “Swimming Hole.”
“How many swimming holes are there in Vermont?” he said. “We didn’t know where it was.”
Then a visitor sent Orton a photo of the exact spot on the White River in the Stockbridge village of Gaysville.
Orton next pointed to Wallace Weir Fahnestock’s “Spring Landscape,” which he knew was painted somewhere in Poultney.
“Mystery solved,” resident Bruce Scott wrote him. “I just talked to a 90-year-old lady whose father owned the slaughterhouse at the end of Candlestick Lane in East Poultney. It is the big building in the front of the painting.”
Orton moved on to Kyra Markham’s “Family Restaurant,” a 1953 depiction of a seemingly anonymous group of diners in Halifax.
“We have a painting of Kyra’s called the ‘First Jamboree,’” Halifax Historical Society president Andrea Rand emailed him. “Some of the people look the same, especially the old woman who appears in the center. She has been identified as Geneva Church, a mother-in-law to one of the people in the painting.”
‘What I’m thinking about now’
In his first hour of signing, Orton was interrupted by a dozen visitors who wanted to talk about the show, only to go on to buy the companion book. He autographed each in pencil rather than pen.
“In case I misspell a name,” he explained.
The exhibit is equally practical. Connoisseurs might raise eyebrows that the show isn’t centered on its most famous artists. Instead, it groups both minor and master works into such themes as “Making A Living,” which pictures sugaring, slate piles and sawmills, and “Coming Together,” which portrays families, fairs and ice fishing.
“We’re trying to make it more egalitarian,” Orton said. “Vermont is the thing that holds the paintings and us all together.”
The exhibit also swaps discreet labels for large-print signs more familiar in a school or senior center.
“If you’re squinting through your bifocals, it’s not much help,” Orton said. “My goal is to reach everyday folks and make them feel at home.”
It’s working. A desk with note cards invites visitors to share thoughts and feelings. Dozens of commenters from Manchester, Vermont, to Manchester, England, have filled entire scrapbooks, adding occasional business cards from such places as the Savannah African Art Museum in Georgia.
“My dad was a sculptor and knew several of the artists in your collection,” wrote Dorset resident Elizabeth Parsons Karet, listing such names as Luigi Lucioni, whose work appears in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“I built Ogden Pleissner’s studio,” Manchester resident Ted Hopkins shared about the late Vermont artist who’s nationally recognized for his Life magazine work and sporting scenes.
“I love how you present your Vermont artworks as stories,” added Mark Tashjian, headmaster of Manchester’s Burr and Burton Academy. “It gives each work a whole different dimension than the typical art history description that focuses on technique and shadow and lighting and so forth. It all felt very relatable.”
Orton credits the exhibit’s popularity to the same fuel that drives his family’s three-generation country stores: a sentimental longing for the past.
“This brings back memories,” he said with a smile.
“For the Love of Vermont: The Lyman Orton Collection” is set to run through Nov. 5, with more information available at the Bennington Museum and Manchester’s Southern Vermont Arts Center websites.
“One of the biggest questions the front desk is getting is, ‘What’s going to happen next?’” Orton said.
His answer: Search for a more permanent place to share his art.
“I know from the store that people will come back and bring their friends and the next generations.”
Wherever the location, the collection will need room to grow. Amid the public response, Orton is hearing from experts with recommendations for additions.
“What I’m thinking about now is what might I have missed?” he said. “I particularly like to buy paintings that have a ‘there’ there. I may not know where it is, but somebody knows, so we keep finding out.”
