Two Brothers, One Exhibit

When Allen Blagden was growing up, his father, Thomas Peabody Blagden, a patrician and courtly fellow who headed The Hotchkiss School’s art department in Lakeville, would pass out art supplies to his offspring, and Allen and his sisters would paint and draw in the afternoons.

“I cared about art, but I was absolutely not interested in a career in art,” Allen says.

“I was not a student, either. A teacher at Town Hill summed it up this way: Allen seems to prefer looking out the window.”

He graduated from Hotchkiss, and when he interviewed at Cornell, he was asked, “What are you interested in?”

“Taxidermy,” he replied. He was fascinated by birds.

“What else?” he was asked.

“I like to paint.” 

And that’s how Allen, excursions to Egypt in his third year and the dispatching of a dreadful rooster outside a factory hotel in Lisle, France, aside, obtained a fine arts degree from Cornell and made a painting career specializing in nature — spectacular birds, woodland scenes and mystical interpretations of Southwest American Indians, decorated with feathers, furs, bones and stones. 

Wonderful examples of his paintings and pencil drawing are mounted in a new show at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery: A Sense of Place: The Art of Allen Blagden ’57, and Tom Blagden Jr. ’69.

Yes. Half a generation after Allen, Tom was born into the Blagden clan and became, eventually, a photographer specializing in landscapes and the conservation of wild spaces. His photographs of waters and rocks and trees etched into aluminum make up the other half of the gallery exhibit. 

To mark the school’s 125th year, art teacher Terri Moore curated this show celebrating art at Hotchkiss and the family that contributed so much to that effort.

Growing up, the two boys barely knew each other, Tom told me. “He was like an uncle.” Allen was so much older, away and occupied with adult matters. Tom was busy fishing and hiking and canoeing and hunting with his dad, who had quit teaching at Hotchkiss and was painting full time. 

“Fishing was my passion. Bass was my quarry, and pickerell. I loved the outdoors.” 

Then Russ Hansen, a physics teacher at Hotchkiss, got Tom interested in photography. “He mentored me. He got me started.” 

In the family’s summer retreat in Dublin, N.H., Tom climbed Mount Monadnock’s metamorphic rock skin and swam in the very cold waters outside town. He was deeply drawn to the remote wilderness camps in the eastern United States and the history of old line families that owned them and protected the land around them. 

After graduating from Harvard, he made a career for himself merging his most powerful interests: Photography, conservation and nature. He has just published his fifth book, “Acadia National Park: A Centennial Celebration,” with many of its images reproduced for this show.

“It’s never been about the photographs,” Tom says. “It’s about the places. It’s about conveying the essence of a landscape in its complexity and spirit.”

So Allen lives in a wonderful house he built in Salisbury (he named it Santa Faux) within sight of the Blagen family’s home occupied, at the moment, by Tom and his wife. 

Both houses are surrounded by rolling fields and hills, promising many hours of hiking, fishing and wandering. And Allen, so fascinated by birds, has 60 or so pigeons that swoop home in a windy rush from the roofs of neighboring barns to their roost in his backyard. 

It’s a glorious sight.

Allen Blagden’s book, “Marking the Moment: The Art of Allen Blagden,” will be published this spring. The show runs at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery through Oct. 9. For information, call 860-435-4423 or go to www.hotchkiss.org/arts.