The idea was hatched in late August. The paintings were created in a whirlwind of six weeks. The exhibit opened last Sunday. For Farmington’s Hill-Stead Museum, founded in 1946 under a mandate of immutability — nothing changes in the collection, ever — the process was “positively hasty,” as J.R.R. Tolkien’s character Treebeard from “The Lord of the Rings” might say.
“Sometimes a deadline is useful,” painter Christian Peltenburg-Brechneff said with a rueful smile.
The Lyme-based artist — whose work is exhibited in museums and homes around the world — is featured in a new exhibit called “Secret Gardens,” showing now through Nov. 30. This special collection of “fresh art” is inspired by Hill-Stead Museum’s treasured landscape itself. And a certain shade of pink.
Dr. Anna Swinbourne, executive director and CEO of Hill-Stead, described the “kismet” moment when it all came together.
“I was working with one of my colleagues to finish a grant application for support to the Garden Conservancy, founded by Francis H. Cabot,” for a new project: the reconstruction of Hill-Stead’s Wild Walking Garden, created by museum founder Theodate Pope Riddle but buried under overgrowth for decades.
By chance, Peltenburg-Brechneff contacted Swinbourne that very day; he’d recently been painting the fantastical Jardins de Quatre-Vents in Quebec, designed by Francis H. Cabot. Maybe there was a connection to be made with Hill-Stead and its gardens?
The serendipitous encounter became the crux of the exhibit. Taking cues from colors and perspectives at Jardins de Quatre-Vents, Peltenburg-Brechneff turned his eye to the mutable, ever-changing views outside the walls of Hill-Stead.
While Hill-Stead’s Sunken Garden, designed by pioneering female landscape designer Beatrix Farrand, was revived in the 1980s, the Wild Walking Garden has completely disappeared from the terrain. Peltenburg-Brechneff’s paintings conjure it back to life from a few archival photographs.
“Secret Gardens” is a series of images in gouache and ink, using a variety of techniques to create riffs: repetition with variation. It has a feeling reminiscent of woodcut printing, or even gravestone rubbing. Similar images appear, each slightly different, across multiple paintings. Perspectives of a gazebo, flowerbeds and wrought-iron fence — or a stone-linked pathway — appear as if across time-lapses, in photo-negative black and white, sepia tint and vibrant full color. The vividly colorful images also appear, at times, like inverted color negatives. There is some “Starry Night” in these works; they glow like dense miniature light shows, like galaxies.
In his work over the summer at the Jardins de Quatre-Vents and Vertefeuille Gardens in Quebec, Peltenburg-Brechneff had been experimenting with one color in particular: pink, a color used by Reeve Schley, a friend and fellow artist in Quebec. A pink that seemed to encapsulate the quality of light in Quebec’s northern climes.
“I don’t usually use pink. Of course, pink is seductive — and in some of the ‘Flower’ paintings that I’ve been doing, it can work. But it is a thin line, that it doesn’t become kitschy and sweet. It is really difficult. Whereas in these paintings, it is a fantasy. And a fantasy can be pink,” Peltenburg-Brechneff noted.
Peltenburg-Brechneff brings a fantastically pink perspective to Hill-Stead’s gardens, and sends the viewer back in time. There’s a feel of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s Middle-Earth here. Follies like bridges, towers, water-pools, sculpted shrubbery appear subtly elvish, mystical. And Peltenburg-Brechneff dialogues with Hill-Stead’s art collection, too. Haystacks are tucked in like notes, as if to say, “You know, there are two of Claude Monet’s haystack paintings inside the museum — and they are fantastical shimmering light shows themselves.”
The story of the museum, haystacks and all, is an intrinsic part of the drama. It was the family estate of Riddle, a pioneering female architect and the founder of Avon Old Farms School, a private school for boys in the early 20th century. After attending Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, she designed and built a capacious Colonial Revival mansion in the early 1900s as a retirement home for her parents, Ada Brooks Pope and Alfred Pope, a wealthy industrialist and art collector.
When Riddle converted her private home to a museum near the end of her life, she left clear instructions: the art in the house was to remain precisely in situ, but shared with the public. In guided tours, you can find Monets, Manets, Degas, Cassatts, Renoirs, and Whistlers on every wall of the house.
“Secret Gardens” is housed in Hill-Stead’s breezy new modern gallery space, a renovation of the carriage barns on the property. Swinbourne described the gallery as “a place where we can tell the many stories behind Theodate, behind the family, behind the collection.”
It is also a place where, it seems, the museum’s future can be invoked. After viewing the luminous “Secret Gardens,” you can walk outside, down the driveway, look out over the landscape, and imagine for yourself how the Wild Walking Garden will reappear.
Christian Peltenburg-Brechneff, born in the former Belgian Congo, has made a life’s work of capturing nature’s mutable landscapes. His highly successful “Flower” series is in galleries and museums in New York, San Francisco, and around the globe.