Lost Beautiful Lives

In 1923 a group of nine painters in Kent, Conn., many of whom had established new lives in the rural landscapes of Litchfield County after leaving New York City, founded The Kent Art Association, which is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary of showcasing the work of regional artists.

Currently on display at the art association’s home on Kent’s South Main Street is a collection of work by the founding members, including Rex Brasher, an ornithologist, and watercolorist dedicated to painting the entirety of North America’s bird species. His 1926 book of work, titled “Secrets of the Friendly Woods” served as inspiration for a 2021 print publication by the Wassaic Project artist collective in Wassaic, N.Y., a curation of bird-inspired works by 29 contemporary artists.

The 100th-anniversary exhibition also features portraiture by the founding president of the Kent Art Association, George Laurence Nelson, who lived at Seven Hearths, the large, charcoal gray clapboard house that once belonged to Kent’s Colonial town founder John Beebe Jr., and now acts at the Kent Historical Society’s home and museum. Nelson’s romantic-charged, often life-sized oil portraits captured the elegance, wit, leisure, and even the melancholy of East Coast creatives in the first half of the 20th century. His subjects of choice were typically his own family, a recurring cast of well-dressed characters which included himself with his wife, Hermine Charlotta Redgrave, who went by Helen, his elderly white-haired mother, the British-born painter Alice Kerr-Nelson Hirschberg who was a regular contributor to the American Watercolor Society in New York, and his better-looking yet tragic brother Edgar, who died early in life.

A mighty collection of Nelson’s work — which when seen all together seems to reveal scenes from an unwritten Fitzgerald novel or an American-set season of Downton Abbey — has been collected and preserved by the Kent Historical Society. Pieces can be viewed hung on the walls of Seven Hearths. They are the glamorous ghosts of the house’s former occupants.

Portrait by G.L. Nelson Courtesy of KAA

Portrait by G.L. Nelson Courtesy of KAA

  

Portrait by G.L. Nelson Courtesy of KAA