FRANK BENSON, Wooster Farm

Faith Andrews Bedford writes: “North Haven was Frank W. Benson’s Giverny.  For almost fifty years, his summer home on this small island, in Maine’s Penobscot Bay, was the setting and inspiration for his most famous Impressionist works of which was written, 'He sets before us visions of the free life of the open air, with figures of gracious women and lovely children, in a landscape drenched in sweet sunlight, and cooled by refreshing sea breezes.  It is a holiday world, in which nothing ugly or harsh enters, but all the elements combine to produce an impression of natural joy of living" (William Howe Downes, "The Spontaneous Gaiety of Frank W. Benson's Work” Arts and Decoration, March 19, 1905). 

“By the time he discovered North Haven, Benson had searched for the perfect summer place for over a decade.  In the early years of his teaching career at the Museum School in Boston, Benson, his wife, Ellen and their children summered at the art colony of Dublin Lake, New Hampshire.  By 1894, he and Edmund Tarbell, a close friend from student days who was also an instructor at the Museum School, taught outdoor art classes on the town pier of Newcastle, New Hampshire. There, Benson made his first pure excursion into a high‑keyed palette and dazzling outdoor light. The Sisters, an award winning painting of his two youngest daughters, Elisabeth and Sylvia, was full of intimacy and affection, typical of the future lyrical, Impressionist pictures of his family.  But, while Benson can be said to have begun his Impressionist period in Newcastle, it was on North Haven that it truly came to fruition.

“Just why Benson decided to seek a new summer spot is not known.  Tarbell remained Benson’s closest friend for nearly fifty years, so a change was not a matter of a rift.  Benson may have simply wanted a place of his own, somewhere remote.  Working in Boston and living in the confines of the city of Salem, with neighbors close on all sides, Benson might have wanted a rustic home with open land and sweeping vistas.  Perhaps it was simply that, with a busy exhibition schedule and academic responsibilities, he no longer needed or wanted to teach summer art classes.

“A friend from Boston’s Tavern Club, Heman Chaplin, invited the Bensons to see his new home on North Haven as well as a home for rent nearby. When Chaplin’s carriage stopped at the top of a rise overlooking Wooster Farm, the Bensons realized the spot had everything they wanted. The farmhouse, a foursquare home with a large central chimney, was big enough to hold the whole Benson household with its many pets and frequent visitors. There were plenty of flat, open fields for gardens, croquet and games of all sorts; an old barn would make a perfect studio.  Waves lapped on a small, crescent beach.  An old orchard stood close to the house.  Benson stood on the hill captivated by the landscape.  The summer sun bathed the fields and the water beyond with dazzling light; the view from all sides was endless.  Few trees broke the sweep of land, sea, and sky since lumbering had cleared the island and the fields were kept open by the farmer’s sheep.  The cool Maine breeze ruffled the meadow grasses and on the western horizon, the blue Camden Hills shimmered in the August haze. 'From the moment we saw it, North Haven felt like home' Benson later told his granddaughter.

“The following summer, 1901, Frank Benson completed a portrait of his oldest daughter, Eleanor, shielding her eyes from the bright summer sun.  It was the first of a long series of North Haven paintings - dazzling plein air works of his family that were praised by critics and collectors alike for capturing the 'joyous gaiety' and 'holiday mood,' of life on the island.  They sold almost as soon as they were exhibited.  As one critic wrote, '[Benson] gets the freshness of the open air into this work.  His fluency is, in itself, captivating and he gives one, in short, a welcome sense of vitality of life outside the studio” (New York Tribune, 1903, Archives of American Art,  Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Scrapbooks, Roll P 53). Whether running through the meadows, posed on a hillside, playing in boats, flying kites, exploring the beaches of Wooster Cove, or sitting quietly in the forest, Benson's children, posed in the idyllic setting of at North Haven, were a source of inspiration for countless paintings.

“When the Bensons began renting Wooster Farm there was neither electricity nor plumbing.  With an eye toward eventual purchase they began immediate improvements.  Their first summer on the island, the Bensons partitioned the barn to form a studio and added a full bath. They eschewed electricity, preferring instead the soft light of candles and kerosene lanterns. The following year they added a piazza and the white bench that was to serve as a prop in so many of Benson’s famous works.  Fireplaces warmed the family on cool Maine evenings, and the maids had to make do with a wood cook stove and a pump at the kitchen sink. Benson was an outdoor man, restless in the confines of the city. He said the physical work necessary to keep Wooster Farm going provided the best sort of exercise. He planted much of the vegetable gardens and did great deal of the work on his summer place. He smoked the fish he caught and enjoyed chopping wood for the evening fire in the parlor where bridge was often played and the chessboard was always set up.

“Benson has taken artistic liberties with this canvas of his summer home, painted from the hilltop on which he so often posed his daughters in their white dresses against the brilliance of an August blue sky. He has reduced the picture to the elements that meant the most to him: the wide sweep of sea and sky, the house itself with its homely touch of laundry flapping in the summer breeze, the blue Camden Hills and the spruce woods in the background and, of course, his family. Nowhere to be seen is the road to the end of Crabtree Point or the homemade, three-hole golf course.[i]  Gone is the tennis court and Benson’s studio.

“North Haven and his studio became the site of many milestones, not only in the life of Benson’s family but in his art as well. His first etching – a medium that would later earn him the title 'Dean of American Etchers' – was made in the studio Benson created from the large barn that had once sheltered Levi Wooster’s cows.  He divided the tall building into two spaces: the larger one, to which he added a talk north window, became his studio; the other was used for storage. [1]

“Just as his etchings and lithographs were first begun at North Haven, so too were the fresh and colorful watercolors that marked the second half of Benson’s career.  In the summer of 1921, when Benson and his son George set off to join friends in Canada’s Maritime Provinces for their annual salmon-fishing trip, his only excursion into watercolor had been black and white wash drawings of hunting scenes and wildfowl. But George encouraged him to try using watercolor to quickly capture the scenes at their camp on the shores of the Bonaventure River.  Benson returned to North Haven with several watercolors and a new passion.  He painted Ellen’s gardens full of billows of phlox and petunias, their colors made more luminescent by the fog drifting across the grass.  Fishermen in the water off the end of his pier were captured as they strained at their nets; birds were depicted soaring above his house.  The lily pond at the edge of the spruce woods became the focus for numerous paintings. The watery views glimpsed from every turn became inspiration for Benson’s North Haven watercolors.[2]

“Benson also left out from this painting the boathouse and docks where the family tied up their boats: sailboats for the Saturday afternoon races, a small motorized dingy that ferried the family to the village and a large dory used for fishing – and as a prop for paintings. When Calm Morning – a canvas of his three oldest children, Eleanor, George and Elisabeth playing in the dory - was reproduced in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, the writer observed, 'Hidden somewhere about Mr. Benson’s studio, I am convinced there is a little jar marked 'Sunshine' into which he dips his brush when he paints his pictures of the summer. It is impossible to believe that mere paint, however cleverly laid on, can glow and shimmer and sparkle as does that golden light on his canvas' (St. Nicholas Magazine, August, 1909. No. 36, p. 883).

“While he may have left out a number of aspects of Wooster Farm, Benson did include the bulls-eye that had been places against a bright green mound of grass that the children called the 'Pile of Peas.' Benson carved bows by hand for each family member according to their height and weight. He also made his own arrows, carefully choosing and trimming the feathers and molding the points. A reporter for the Boston Herald, writing in 1902 about the 'Boston colony' of summer residents on the island, noted that Benson, 'besides being an artist was an expert archer and could send the arrow into the bull’s eye twice out of five times at 100 yards' (Charles H. Caffin, “The Art of Frank W. Benson,” Harpers Monthly Magazine, 3 June 1909, vol. 119, p. 709).

“Outdoor games and activities played a large part in the Bensons’ life. Although his three daughters are depicted in this painting in the long white dresses their father asked them to wear when they posed for him, they would never have considering retiring demurely to the sidelines and merely observing the men at sport.  Family photograph albums reveal the three sisters climbing trees, playing tennis, helping at clambakes, hiking, rock climbing, playing baseball, rowing, fishing, sailing, practicing archery, and tending the vegetable gardens--all in long skirts.   When the family built a new boathouse, the girls and their mother were up on the roof hammering shingles.

“Wooster Farm was a central force in Benson’s life. His children thought of it as their spiritual home.  His daughter Elisabeth, to whom he gave this painting, returned to North Haven almost every summer of her life. As Benson’s friend, the art critic Charles H. Caffin, once wrote, 'This spot of nature . . . has been so inspirational to Benson that he has never felt the desire or need to revisit the associations of the Old World, in which he spent his student days . . ..  It is a place where life and art can be consistently at one:  both partaking freely of the inspiration of the surroundings and working together for good.'  [3]

“When Elisabeth’s older sister, Eleanor, decided to become a painter, her father told her that it would be a long hard journey but she would do well if she remember to 'paint what you love.'  As is evident in this portrait of his summer home, he followed his own advice.”

[1] A rudimentary grass tennis court was one of the first improvements the Bensons made to Wooster Farm, but by l909, they were ready for the real thing.   “Hired W. R. Dole to work a new tennis court,” Benson wrote in the log. “He brought five men and a team of horses.  Ploughed, harrowed, leveled and hauled off 50 loads of stones.  Put on as many more of swamp muck and manure.  Seeded ground about Aug. 15th. F.W.B. cut trees for fence." Wooster Farm Log, 1909.  Family collection and Benson Papers. First quoted in Bedford, Faith Andrews. Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist. (Rizzoli, 1994)

[2] Although the studio itself was strictly off limits to the children, they were not beyond occasionally sneaking in for games when they thought their father was elsewhere. A brief note in the Wooster Farm Log in Benson’s handwriting indicates that, sometimes, they were caught. "July  l4--Children using my studio as a squash court." (Ibid)

[3] Sylvia kept a log of her father’s watercolor work which includes, merely, the 531 that were sold or exhibited.  The list does not include the dozens he gave away or the more than fifty he executed between 1941 and his death ten years later. His watercolors were wildly popular and, sometimes to Benson’s dismay, were sold “even before they were dry.  As he wrote to a friend “It certainly is very heartening when you do something in a new way to find that other people are pleased with it. It makes life much more fun than it was before.”(FWB to C. Powell Minnigerode, 20 December 1921. Benson File, Corcoran  Gallery of Art)