Richard M. Powers:

The Art of Science Fiction

Millions of  readers — especially of sci-fi — have seen his pictures, but few knew the name of Richard M. Powers, the artist whose work revolutionized science-fiction art and has appeared on the covers of more than 800 of the best science fiction books.

Powers’s career spanned more than 50 years. “During that time he established himself as one of America’s preeminent illustrators for science fiction novels as he transformed that style of illustration with what he once termed ‘abstract surrealist expressionism,’ nearly creating a style of fantasy art,” wrote Ridgefield Press reporter Jonathan Pingle in 1996.

In 1983, Locus, the science fiction industry’s newspaper, described his work as having “revolutionized science fiction book cover art in the fifties.” 

Richard Michael Gorman Powers — he sometimes used the name Gorman Powers, reflecting his mother’s maiden name — was born in Chicago in 1921. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois, and during World War II served with the Army Signal Corps. After the war he continued his studies at The New School in New York.

In 1949 Powers began doing art for Doubleday’s science fiction hardcover books, and was an almost immediate success. He wound up doing the cover art for such classics as Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sand and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. 

In 1952 he was included in the New Talent Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where his work is now part of the permanent collection. Over the years he has also exhibited at  the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  the National Academy, and at the Whitney Museum, all in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.  

In 2001, Jane Frank, Vincent Di Fate, and son Richard Gid Powers wrote a book, The Art of Richard Powers.  DiFate, a science fiction artist, said Powers had “an emotional rhythm that is captivating, plumbing the depths of the human spirit and challenging the will of that spirit to survive in a future life with danger. These paintings are far more than insightful, they are, in a word, brilliant.”

As an illustrator, his work went beyond science fiction, appearing in all areas of publishing from the late 1940s to the 1990s. He produced literally thousands of book jackets and covers including the first edition of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, the Dell Laurel Poets series, and most the Easton Press’s editions of Hemingway’s works.

He also did the book jacket and some interior illustrations for Silvio Bedini’s Ridgefield in Review, the 1958 history published for the town’s 250th anniversary celebration. In 1983, for the town’s 275th birthday, he did a poster of the Battle of Ridgefield.

 Powers and his family moved to Ramapoo Road in 1954, then to Old Branchville Road. In 1966, he sold his Old Branchville Road house, building a smaller home on his remaining land on Bloomer Road. 

He died in 1996 in Madrid, Spain, where he had been wintering each year with his daughter, Elizabeth. (His son, Richard Gid Powers, is a history professor and author of such books as  Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover and Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI.)

Richard Powers was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2016. 

He was also honored in a rather unusual way. In 2017, Andy Partridge, former frontman of the British New wave band XTC, released a CD of music inspired by Powers’ art. According to Partridge, as a boy, he used to borrow three science fiction books a week, take them home and instead of reading them, he’d stare at the Richard Powers art. “Mesmerized by the covers,” he imagined his own stories to match the paintings as he stared at them, sometimes for hours.  Later, he created “a sort of soundtrack to the paintings,” as one critic put it.  “The resulting album [is] a musical accompaniment to the variety of alien landscapes which Powers illustrated so profusely.”

The name of the CD album? “Powers.”

J. Alden Weir: 

Our Unstamped Artist

A half dozen Ridgefield artists have been celebrated on U.S. postage stamps. Some, like Frederic Remington and Charles Sheeler, have been honored on more than one stamp. Yet J. Alden Weir, whose homestead is now the only National Historic Site commemorating an American painter, has been unrecognized philatelically.

Except in the Central African Republic, which has issued several stamps in his honor and where he no doubt never set foot.

The artist will, however, be remembered on the Weir Farm National Historic Site Quarter, which is scheduled to be released in 2020 as part of the U.S. Mint’s “America the Beautiful Quarters Program.” 

Born in 1852 at West Point, N.Y., Julian Alden Weir got his first training as an artist from his father, Robert Weir,  a painter who spent more than four decades teaching drawing at the U.S. Military Academy. He took courses at the National Academy of Design and in 1873 went to Paris where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and became enchanted with the concept of the plein air painting — working outdoors amid nature. He was also introduced to Impressionism, but was not at all enchanted, calling the style “worse than the Chamber of Horrors.”

He returned to the U.S. in 1877, but continued to return frequently to Europe, working at times with Eduoard Manet and James McNeill Whistler (he described Whistler as a “first-class specimen of an eccentric man”). He began exhibiting his paintings in Paris and other cities including, of course, New York, where he taught painting at the Art Students League and Cooper Union, did

portrait commissions, and had his home.

In 1882,  Erwin Davis, for whom Weir had procured a number of pieces of art in Europe, saw a painting that Weir had just acquired for $560 (about $14,700 today). Davis wanted the painting and offered Weir an old Beers family farmhouse at Nod Hill Road and Pelham Lane in Ridgefield, along with 152 acres in both Wilton and Ridgefield, in exchange for the painting and $10 cash.

Though he had had a place in the Adirondacks, Weir loved the Connecticut farm, “drawn to the modest-scale scenery in Branchville — the meadows of corn and grass, the apple trees, the rocky terrain, the stone walls, the English-style barns, and the small red Greek Revival farmhouse,” Jay Axelbank wrote in The New York Times in 1999.

Weir subsequently expanded the farm to 238 acres and over the years he lived there, continued to maintain it as a working farm. Today,  60 acres belong to the Weir Farm National Historic Site, and another 110 acres are permanently protected by the Weir Farm Art Center, formerly the Weir Preserve.

For the artist, the farm became the inspiration for many paintings and encouraged his move to Impressionism. Weir often painted outdoors there, and invited many of his friends to do the same. Among his visitors were Childe Hassam, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Singer Sargent, and John Twachtman, all of them Impressionists. By the early 1890s, he considered himself an Impressionist.

While he is most widely known for his oil paintings, Weir was an accomplished artist in watercolors, etching, and stained glass. He painted not only landscapes, but many portraits and figure

studies. Today his works are in most major American museums of art, and in many European museums.

In 1882 Weir met Anna Dwight Baker, who was a 19-year-old student in his art class. It was love at first sight; the couple was engaged three weeks later, and married the next year.  Anna Weir was the subject of scores of paintings and etchings by her husband, many of which are now in museums and galleries. “She is remembered today as one of Julian’s staunchest supporters and his artistic inspiration,” says a Weir Farm profile of her.

They  had three daughters: Caroline, Dorothy and Cora. A son, Julian Alden Jr., died as an infant. Anna died 10 days after Cora’s birth in 1892. Later that year Julian married Anna’s sister, Ella Baker, who had been helping take care of his children, and he also inherited the Baker family farm in Windham, where he would also stay and paint. (His family still owns the farm.) Ella, who had also studied painting, became more interested in photography and practiced the art much of her life.

By the 20th Century Weir had become a major figure in American art. A founder of the Society of American Artists, he served as its president and also led the National Academy of Design and the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. He was on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

J. Alden Weir died in 1919, but the farm continued to be the home of artists for many decades to come. Ella lived on the Branchville farm with her stepdaughter, Dorothy, until her death in 1930. A year later, Dorothy married Mahroni Young, the noted sculptor, who moved to the farm and expanded its barn studio. Young created the sculptures for his famous Mormon monument, “This Is the Place,” in his studio at the farm and they were transported by train to their huge pedestal outside

Salt Lake City.

Dorothy died in 1947 and Young, 10 years later. The farm was then purchased by Sperry and Doris Andrews, husband and wife artists who had been friends of Young. They lived the rest of their lives there and spearheaded the efforts that led to its becoming a National Park site in 1990.

Weir’s older brother, John Ferguson Weir, was also a well-known landscape artist, but chiefly of the Hudson River school. In 1869 he was hired as a professor of painting and design at Yale University, where he created the first academic art program on an American college campus.

John stayed at the Branchville farm while Julian and Anna were on their honeymoon in Europe. At one point he wrote his brother, “I advise you to hang on to this place, old boy; a ‘lonesome lodge’ which a pleasant place of retreat in times of storm or drought is no bad thing to have — for an artist. Keep it trim and untrammeled and you will find it a haven of refuge.”

A Treeful Of Artists

This remarkable photograph was taken in 1974 to mark the founding of the new Ridgefield Guild of Artists, whose members gathered in and about this huge oak on the grounds of the old Holy Ghost Novitiate on Prospect Ridge.

The guild had just gotten a $1-a-year lease for a small, old barn on the grounds that had been purchased by the town four years earlier. The artists renovated the building into their headquarters and gallery, still in use today. Their first show in the barn opened Memorial Day weekend, 1974.

Like the guild, that wonderful tree is also still alive and well near the building, which is at the end of Halpin Lane off Prospect Ridge Road.

The trouble is: We have no record of who took the picture and the identification of many of the people in the picture had not been found.

Thanks to the folks at the guild, we were able to obtain the accompanying copy of the picture, with the names of some of the artists overlaid on it. Those identifications were provided some years ago by the late Gail Rogers Glissmann Fields, who herself appears in the photo.

More than half the faces remain unidentified? Can anyone help fill in the artistic blanks?

Charles Roswell Bacon: 

An Unappreciated Artist

Among the thousands of gravestones in the Ridgefield Cemetery off North Salem Road is one lying on the ground. It’s hard to tell whether the stone was once upright and fell over, or was placed flat when it was new. But slowly the surrounding sod has been covering the face so that it is becoming harder and harder to read.

The disappearing gravestone is perhaps symbolic of the life and death of Charles   Roswell Bacon, a promising American artist and father of noted American author and illustrator Peggy Bacon. The son of a man who drank himself to death, Bacon lost two sons in infancy, struggled with poverty as he sought success as a painter and, depressed over the lack of recognition for his work, killed himself.

Born in New York City in 1867 to a middle-class family, Charles Roswell Bacon knew hard times from a very young age. His father, after the failure of his business as a marble importer, drank

himself to death when Charles was only six years old, and Bacon left public school at the age of 10 to help support his family. However, he showed an early talent for painting, and was able to study at the Art Students’ League in Manhattan. There he met his future wife, Elizabeth Chase, a miniaturist who came from Kentucky.

The artistic pair studied for a year in Paris, including spending time with Claude Monet at Giverny. They returned to the United States and wound up in Ridgefield where they were married  in 1892 and, to support themselves, took jobs managing a new resort hotel here. 

The Inn, built in 1891-92 on the eastern side of southern Main Street,  operated only during

the warmer months, giving both Bacons a chance to paint and travel in the off-season. They continued to operate the hotel into the early 1900s.

Their daughter, Margaret Frances “Peggy” Bacon, was born there in 1895. Two sons born later died in infancy, and are buried in Ridgefield Cemetery.

The three Bacons became a tight-knit family, one that Peggy Bacon remembered with fondness.

“I had the most charming and amusing parents,” she said in a 1973 interview. “We led a very close life together. There was a great deal of reading aloud. They were both very well read.”

“Mother and Father were never affluent. That’s putting it mildly,” Peggy told a Smithsonian Institution interviewer. “As I recall, all my life we had an extraordinary amount of amenities and delicacies even, and delights considering that they were poverty-stricken. The food was marvelous, very gourmet food. And there were quantities of books, endless books arriving. And a great deal of charm. 

“They were people of taste. Father was very well-read in French. He spoke French so well

that French people mistook him for a Frenchman. And yet he had no schooling from the age of ten.”

When the Inn was closed off-season, “We spent certain winters in New York when I was a child,” Peggy Bacon said. “He took me around to galleries. Then we lived in France for a couple of years, at Montreaux-sur-Mer in Picardy. It was absolutely delightful….It was a lovely life, really. Well, Father was very gregarious.”

Peggy herself was largely home-schooled as a child. Because they were always struggling to earn enough money to live on, the Bacons were unable to send Peggy to the equivalent of high school. Seeing this, two family friends in Ridgefield paid to send Peggy to a boarding school, Kent Place School in Summit, N.J. 

Perhaps it was at this time that Charles composed the poem and drew the self-portrait and sketch of Peggy that is now in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection. He wrote:

“What is it that this Daddy wants?

“Perhaps a drink o’water!

“O! No. He is so sad because

“He wants his Little Daughter.”

At the turn of the 20th Century, Charles Bacon was gaining some notoriety. He had exhibitions at the Fulton Gallery and at the Milch Gallery in New York. His works were also in the famous Armory Show in Manhattan in the early 1910s. 

However, by 1913 when he and Elizabeth had a home in South Salem and he had a studio   in Manhattan, he was becoming increasingly depressed. And on Friday, Oct. 10, he went to his studio, apparently finished a landscape he had been painting, wrote a two-sentence will, and turned on the gas jets in the room. He was found dead by a janitor the next day.

The New York Times had never covered Bacon’s work until he died. Like a yellow tabloid, it then did the 725-word story about the discovery of his body, under the headline, “Find Artist Dead A Suicide by Gas.”

The story reported police finding a note, composed to be his will. “I leave to my beloved wife everything of which I die possessed — pictures, frames, clothes, everything. Intending this night to commit suicide, I cannot have this witnessed, but it should carry conviction with it.”

While his wife and daughter were shocked at the suicide, there had been signs that the artist was troubled.

“Mr. Bacon had been despondent for some time over the lack of recognition of his work by the public and critics,” The Times reported his brother-in-law, J.W. Colt, as saying.

Three months later, the newspaper carried a brief story about the sale of his studio full of paintings at the Anderson Galleries. The entire collection brought $4,255 — more than $100,000 in today’s dollars, with the biggest sale being $435 ($10,800 in 2018).

Today, a fact that might surprise the painter, Bacon’s works sell for as much as $7,000 at at auctions. Some, however, fetch only a few hundred dollars.

Elizabeth continued to live in the 18th Century farmhouse at the corner of Spring Street and Boutonville Road in South Salem, and by the 1930s was operating an antiques business. A barn on her property was used as an office by both the local visiting nurses and as the performance venue for an active South Salem theater group. However, in the 1950s the barn was purchased and moved to Route 35 where it became the dining room — and probably the namesake — of the popular restaurant called The Hayloft.

Bacon was not only a painter, but a poet, whose work appeared in magazines and newspapers at the turn of the 20th Century. Probably his best-known poem was published in The Century magazine in 1901 and was reprinted in newspapers across the country. It was a somewhat dark work that ended, unlike his life, on a note of hope:  

UNDER THE SUN

The men who have gone before us

Have sung the songs we sing; 

The words of our clamorous chorus,

They were heard of the ancient king.

The chords of the lyre that thrill us,

They were struck in the years gone by,

And the arrows of death that kill us

Are found where our fathers lie.

The vanity sung of the Preacher

Is vanity still to-day;

The moan of the stricken creature

Has rung in the woods alway.

But the songs are worth resinging, 

With the change of no single note.

And the spoken words are ringing

As they rang in the years remote.

There is no new road to follow, Love!

Nor need there ever be,

For the old, with its hill and hollow, Love,

is enough for you and me.

“Grrrrrrrrrrr!!”

This rather arresting painting once spent a summer in Ridgefield and  now resides in a major museum. But almost as interesting as the picture itself is the man who took this photograph  used in publicizing it.

In the summer of 1983 (May 22 to Sept. 11), the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, as it was then called, staged an exhibit called “Changes 1960-1982.” Among the works exhibited was “Grrrrrrrrrrr!!” this  oil-and-magna on canvas by the noted American artist, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997).

The Aldrich described the exhibit as “a survey of the development of 13 of America’s most important artists.” Indeed, it was a who’s who of contemporary artists that consisted of, besides Lichtenstein, three works each from Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol.

“Grrrrrrrrrrr!!” was painted in 1965, inspired by a panel Lichtenstein saw in a 1962 comic book, “Our Fighting Forces,” published by what is now DC Comics. The artist apparently liked the painting enough that he never sold it and instead bequeathed it to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it remains today. The museum used it for promotional posters for its 1993 exhibition, “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective.”

Lichtenstein had earlier done another work of a dog, inspired by “Our Fighting Forces,” called “Arrrrrff.” At a 1996 Christie’s auction, it sold for $420,500.

To promote its exhibit, the Aldrich sent to The Ridgefield Press this black-and-white photograph. (The painting itself is mostly black-and-white, except for the background of the  Grrrrrrrrrrr!!, which is yellow.)

The picture was taken by Rudolph Burckhardt (1914-1999), a noted Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker, who has been the subject of a number of major exhibits himself. Unlike most mass-produced publicity pictures, Burckhardt’s was printed on heavy stock and hand-labeled on the back, “Lichtenstein #160,” presumably by Burckhardt himself, above his stamped photo credit.

Burckhardt, who taught many years at the University of Pennsylvania, was known for his pictures of urban and country life, especially his scenes of New York City in the 1930s and 40s. 

He marked his 85th birthday on Aug. 1, 1999, by jumping into a lake on his property in Searsmont, Maine, and drowning. 

This photograph was in the archives of The Ridgefield Press and is being donated to the Ridgefield Historical Society, along with many hundreds of other Ridgefield-related pictures.

Arthur and Teddy Edelman: 

Fine Hides and An Old Barn 

When Arthur and Teddy Edelman came to Ridgefield a half century ago, they wanted a home that reflected their many and varied interests and talents that ranged from being leaders in the world  of luxury leathers and modern design, to their love of antiques and fine art, including the Old Masters.

So they bought a barn, took it apart, moved it five miles, and put it back together in a much glassier form. And there they lived the rest of their creative lives.

The Edelmans spent their long careers in the field of fine leathers and fashionable things crafted from them, working with people like Andy Warhol, who was their graphic designer for six years. The company they founded, Edelman Leather, supplies top designers today.

 Born in the Bronx in 1925, Arthur Jay Edelman was a son of Russian immigrants. His father was a leather tanner, but that’s not what the young Arthur wanted to be: After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, he studied acting at Sarah Lawrence College, which had been a well-known women’s school.

“He went there when it was the first year they allowed men in,” said a co-worker. “He figured his odds were pretty good to meet a girl!” 

He did just that, meeting Theodora “Teddy” Joffe, a Brooklyn native born in 1928. Four days

after graduating, they were married and, 66 years later, they became the longest married couple to have met at Sarah Lawrence.

After deciding acting was not his forte, Arthur joined Teddy in creating pieces of art from leathers. That didn’t produce enough money to survive on so the two went to work for Teddy’s family business, Fleming-Joffe, in New York, which was to become a leading supplier of high-fashion leathers and reptile skins. The two eventually took over the company’s management. 

Andy Warhol joined Fleming-Joffe as a graphic designer,  producing many posters and advertising art pieces.  In 2016 Arthur Edelman told The Guardian how he first met and hired the artist in 1957. 

“One day I was calling on one of our most important customers...in the Empire State Building,”

he said. “I was waiting in a darkened hallway when a very peculiar-looking man walked in and joined me. He had a white face, hair that was the brightest white — it just didn’t belong to a human being. His suit looked like it had been pressed under his bed overnight, his shoes were paint-splattered with all the colors of the rainbow. And he was holding a portfolio. 

“Now, I’m a big man — six feet six inches — and I was scared.”

It turned out the specter was a struggling artist, there to show some proposed commercial work to Edelman’s customer. Edelman looked at the pictures, which involved snakeskin shoes. They were “most extraordinary,” he said.

The Edelmans had been looking for a promotional designer and Warhol was looking for a full-time job, and thus began a six-year relationship. “He came back to our offices a few blocks over and

shocked our receptionist with his appearance,” Arthur said. “He and Teddy immediately took a huge liking to one another. Teddy was very motherly to him, which I think he liked.”

Warhol and the Edelmans remained friends until the artist’s death in 1987.

In 1971 the Edelmans sold Fleming-Joffe and exactly 10 years later launched Edelman Leather, which today provides luxury upholstery to architects and interior designers for high-end residential, office, hotel, aviation, and marine projects. “We are in the business of art,” the company says.  “Our art is leather.”

     For his old friends in a new business, Warhol created what has become a well-known poster in art circles,  “This is a chair...”

In between their two careers running leather companies, the Edelmans decided to move to the “country,” buying around 30 acres of old farmland on Spring Valley Road. They wanted a custom-designed house with lots of views of the beautiful Mopus Valley, but they both loved antiques and wanted it to have a flavor of the old.

     They decided to fashion a new house from an old barn and

found the barn they liked on North Street, part of the old Stonecrest estate owned by the Conklin family. In November 1968, the huge, 6,800-square-foot structure was carefully dismantled and each piece

labeled before being moved to Spring Valley Road to create a new barn-like house. 

The result is an 8,500 square-foot, seven bedroom home that became the center of their estate. The barnwood walls displayed their collection of paintings by the Old Masters and new talents — from Paul de Vos to, of course, Andy Warhol. They also had many fine antiques that included

priceless Tiffany lamps.

The estate’s name? Something one wouldn’t expect in Ridgefield but would expect from the Edelmans: “Alligator Farm.”

Teddy Edelman died in 2016 at the age of 88, Arthur two years later at 92.

Among their five children, at least two have become leaders in fields related to design.  John, their youngest son, is president and CEO of the contemporary furniture company, Design Within Reach, which has three dozen stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico. The oldest son, Sam, founded Sam Edelman high-fashion footwear.

Charles Sheeler, 

Precise Painter

One of the leading American painters of the 20th Century lived and worked in a historic Ridgefield building that, like too many other relics of the town’s past, has disappeared.

The Whipstick District schoolhouse stood on the northern corner of Whipstick and Nod Roads. After it closed in 1915, the small building was incorporated into a wing of stucco-covered house. There, American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler lived and worked for 10 years. 

As a painter Sheeler was famous for his “precisionist” style. He was also well known and

respected as a photographer, who was hired by Henry Ford to photograph his factories, and worked many years for such Conde Nast publications as Vogue.

Born in 1883 in Philadelphia, Charles Rettrew Sheeler Jr. studied art with William Merritt Chase, a noted American Impressionist, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and then went off to Europe to study both modern and classical painting. 

Back in Philadelphia, using a Kodak Brownie that cost $5, he taught himself photography. To help his income, he became a freelance commercial photographer. That medium influenced his art, and his paintings began to take on the precision of a photograph. His work for Ford also influenced him, and he became best known as painter of machines and industrial scenes as well as commercial ships. 

Throughout his life, Sheeler continued to both photograph and paint America and Americana, and he was widely considered a master at both media.

“Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward,” he said in a 1938 interview. 

Several of his paintings use views of the inside or outside of his Ridgefield home, including   “Newhaven” and “An Artist Looks at Nature,” The latter is a 1943 surreal painting in which he incorporates a self-portrait photograph of himself (probably taken in Ridgefield), his house in Ridgefield, and the Hoover Dam, which he had photographed in 1939 while he lived here.  

His work is in many of the major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Sheeler moved to the Whipstick house in 1932. He wife, Katherine, died a year later. He lived

alone for nine years but socialized often with friends, including the poet William Carlos Williams and photographer Edward Steichen, who lived in nearby Redding.

In 1942, Sheeler married Musya Sokolova, a Russian dancer and photographer, and the couple soon moved to Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. He died there in 1965. 

In 2013, Sheeler became the seventh Ridgefielder to be commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp. The issue, part of a sheet on “Modern Art in America,” shows his famous 1930 painting, “American Landscape.”

Unfortunately, the schoolhouse-home where he painted and which he used in some of his paintings, was demolished in 2000 to make way for a much larger house.  

Frederic Fayerweather: 

The Man from Tiffany’s

On Oct. 5, 1914, at 6 a.m., a dapper little man with a long waxed moustache and wearing spats entered the Ridgefield Town Hall. Municipal elections back then were in October, and the town had just bought a modern replacement for the paper ballot system that been used for two centuries. It cost $600 — about $15,000 today.

Frederic Fayerweather  became the first person in Ridgefield to cast a ballot using voting machine.

But that was hardly the Ridgefield native’s most notable achievement. A bachelor and lifelong resident who commuted to the city,  Fayerweather was one of the top talents at Tiffany Studios in New York. He oversaw projects throughout the country for Louis Comfort Tiffany and was an expert on the design and use of stained glass windows for churches.

An unusual piece of Fayerweather-designed religious art is viewed by hundreds of Ridgefield church-goers each week.

Frederic Moore Fayerweather was born in the Florida District of Ridgefield in 1860, the only child of John and Catherine Moore Fayerweather. His father, a teacher,  played the organ at the Methodist Church in Georgetown — and, in fact, he helped the Georgetown Methodists acquire the organ, making it one of the few churches in the area at the time with a musical instrument.

His parents died when he was young and Frederic was brought up by two maiden aunts, “the Misses Morris.”

He attended the old red-brick Florida Schoolhouse and in his late teens became a teacher, instructing classes at the Ridgebury and Limestone Schools. 

By his early 20s he was working in New York City and at 22, joined Tiffany Studios, which specialized in art decorations, especially stained glass windows. He became head of the monumental department, and was considered an expert in color harmony and in the design of stained-glass windows.

The New York Times reported that “Mr. Fayerweather was chosen frequently by Mr. Tiffany to go to distant parts of the country to decorate homes and offices with the studios’ products, which included Tiffany Favrile glass, devised by Mr. Tiffany, as well as bronze objects, furniture, clocks and goblets. He was an expert on stained glass windows for churches and often supervised the design of these windows.”

Fayerweather worked for Tiffany for more than 40 years. For all that time, he made his home in Ridgefield and commuted by rail — from the 1880s until his retirement in 1931.

In an obituary, The Ridgefield Press described him late in his life: “Always immaculately dressed, Mr. Fayerweather, until recent weeks, belied his age. His step was brisk and his carriage erect and imposing.”

Like his father Fayerweather was deeply interested in religion and especially its rituals. Unlike his Methodist father, Frederic was an Episcopalian and, in fact, a pillar of St. Stephen’s Church where he was a vestryman for many years. He sang tenor in the choir, then became the choirmaster and choir director.  One of his last duties was to arrange the music for the church service that occurred just before his death.

When he died in 1941 at the age of 80, he left most of his estate to St. Stephen’s, including creating a fund to pay the salaries of a quartet of men and women singers. He also wanted the church to spend at least $1,200 annually for an organist — that’s about $20,000 in today’s money. 

Fayerweather, who was described by The Times as “an Episcopal ritualist,” also left the parish a reredos — a huge ornamental screen designed to be situated behind the altar — that he and W. Kerr Rainsford, architect of St. Stephen’s church, designed together.  However, reported Robert S. Haight in his history of St. Stephen’s, “many felt it detracted from the natural beauty and simplicity of the altar and chancel. The reredos was removed in 1965 and was for some time stored in the basement of the church. Ultimately it was given to the First Congregational Church where it did enhance the beauty of the chancel.”

Rob Kinnaird, a historian of St. Stephen’s, reports that the Rev. Aaron Manderbach, rector of the church, had an expert in Episcopal church architecture look at the reredos. He found it not in keeping with St. Stephen’s Georgian style. That, “along with the church’s program to move the altar forward so the celebrant faced the worshipers, contributed to the eventual dismantling of the reredos,” Kinnaird said.

The Congregationalists apparently also found the Fayerweather reredos too elaborate and perhaps overpowering and it reportedly found a new home in a church in another community.

 John Walter Scott Jr.: 

Artist of the West

John Walter Scott Jr. had a varied and successful career as an illustrator and an artist whose works were enjoyed by millions of people, most of whom did not know his name.

Born in 1907 in New Jersey, Scott was attending art school at the age of 16, and by the time he was in his 20s, was freelancing covers for some of the leading pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s, including All Star Fiction, Best Western, Detective Short Stories, Future Fiction,  Marvel Science Stories, Mystery Tales, Quick-Trigger Western, Real Sports, Two-Gun Western,  Uncanny Tales, and Western Novel and Short Stories.

By the late 1930s, he was moving to slick magazines like Coronet, Woman’s Day and This Week, doing covers and story illustrations.

During the war, he joined the staff of Yank, an Army magazine covering events on the European battle front. His war drawings are now part of the Army’s historical archives.

After the war, he began to focus his illustrations on the outdoors, doing hunting and fishing pictures for Sports Afield, True, and Argosy, all men’s magazines.  He eventually got commissions

for large-scale murals in major buildings; some of his best-known were for the Mormon temples at Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C.

John Scott spent his last years as an artist of the Old West — perhaps he was influenced by the pulp western covers he did in the 1930s as well as by the work of Frederic Remington — who died in Ridgefield two years after Scott was born. In the 1970s and 80s, he was being referred to as the “dean of the Remington Traditionalists.” His western works show up on the art market today; one recently sold at auction for $22,500. (Originals of his 1930s pulp fiction cover art fetch as much as $12,000.)

Even as an illustrator, Scott painted what he liked to paint, but in his final years, he seemed to enjoy himself most as an artist of the West. “I paint the pictures I am interested in painting,” he once

told an interviewer. “Much of contemporary art is about people who think they are ‘in.’ The quickest way to lose yourself is to lose your individuality. The important thing is to be yourself and forget about being ‘in.’ ”

Mr. Scott died in 1987 at the age of 79. He was married to Flavia “Punky” Scott, also an artist, who died in 2011; her father was prolific magazine artist, Frank Bensing. 

The Scotts, who came here in 1948, owned an 1860s house on North Salem Road that is now on the National Register of Historic Places; it was once the home of early circus manager Lewis June. 

Richard Scarry:  

The Father of Busytown

The man who created Bananas Gorilla with his armload of watches, Sergeant Murphy blowing his whistle, and Mr. Fixit with his chest of tools, was — in his early years — a Ridgefielder.

Many kids who grew up from the 1960s onward knew the creations of Richard Scarry. Huckle Cat, Lowly Worm, and many other characters from his pen have been friends to tens of millions of children. 

“Scarry revealed to kids that the everyday world was a place that could be understood — and that learning was fun,” said one biography of the author and illustrator. 

Born in 1919 in Boston, Richard Scarry dropped out of business school and then studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. After serving as an Army lieutenant during World War II, he became a freelance artist in New York City. 

In 1950, he illustrated Katherine Jackson’s “The Animals Merry Christmas” for Simon and Schuster, and a career was born; first editions of this 19-cent book can fetch hundreds of dollars today. 

In February 1951, he and his wife Patsy moved to Ridgefield from New York City, leasing a place on the Conklin farm on North Street — a locale that inspired many of his later farm illustrations. In 1953, the couple bought their first home, also on North Street. The Scarrys could often be seen driving around town in their MG sports car. 

Throughout the 50s he illustrated books for Golden Press. In 1955, he did Jane Werner’s “Smokey the Bear,” a Golden Book. Many of today’s images of Smoky the Bear are based on Scarry’s imagining of him. 

In 1953, their son was born;  though they named him Richard Jr., he was always called Huck — like the Busytown cat who would follow — and today Huck Scarry produces children’s books himself. 

In 1959, the Scarrys moved to Westport, and 10 years later, to Switzerland. 

Scarry’s first major success as an author illustrator was “The Best Word Book Ever,” published in 1963, which introduced Busytown; it sold more than seven million copies in its first 12 years. Over his 26-year career, he did more than 300 books that have sold more than 100 million copies in 30 languages; scores are still in print. 

“I’m not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten,” he once said. “I am very happy when people write that they have worn out my books, or that they are held together by Scotch tape. I consider that the ultimate compliment.” 

He died in 1994 in Switzerland at the age of 75. His papers and much of his art are now in the University of Connecticut archives. Huck lives in Vienna.

Adam Salvo: 

A Huge Inspiration

Teachers are among the most memorable people we meet in life. And a Ridgefield teacher who produced many great memories — and great students — was Adam Salvo, who taught art at RHS for nearly 40 years.

“He was one of my all time favorite teachers in high school,” said alumnus David C. Selwitz, Class of 1973. “Such an inspiration to so many young adults. I loved him.”

Michael Adam Salvo was born in New Haven in 1935 and graduated from what is now Southern Connecticut State University. He went on to earn a master’s degree at Columbia University,  received a degree in art from the Ecole des Beaux-arts at the Palais de Fontainebleau in France, and studied at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

He began teaching at Southern Connecticut State in 1957, but two years later came to Ridgefield High School where he soon created and taught the school’s first art history course. He also taught painting and other fine arts, became chairman of the Art Department, and over the years he fostered many young artists. 

When news of his death in 2012 was posted on Old Ridgefield, there was an outpouring of praise, including:

“He was a huge inspiration and just the encouraging voice I always needed at the time,” said Terry L. Britton. “He sure went to bat for me on several occasions — I'm grateful that I had someone like him in my life.”

“He truly made me believe I could enjoy and participate in art,” said Cynthia Glasbrenner. “I was never talented, but he told me no one could match my enthusiasm.”

“He was a patient man; I gave him a little bit of holy hell in my senior year,” recalled Tom Bennett.  “I had scored straight A's in art class for 3 1/2 straight years and in the last term of my final year, he gave me a B. It was like receiving an F in anything else for me. I discovered it as a good kick in the pants and I went on to become a painter and illustrator.”

Rob Kinnaird called him “a great man who saw my potential and changed my life.”

“His class opened many doors,” wrote Maren Sirine. “He opened his heart and home to many. A favorite teacher who inspired and encouraged me to go to art school, too. I survived high school with his help!”

Salvo was active in the Aldrich Museum, and was a founder in 1993 of the museum’s Student Docent Program, which began with just two schools in Ridgefield and 10 years later involved 45 schools in 16 towns. The program trains and provides students to serve as docents at the museum.

In 2006, the Aldrich staged a show, called “Homecoming.” Exhibiting artists Damian Loeb, Sarah Bostwick and Doug Wada, all with studios in New York, shared what The New York Times called “a seminal experience”: They each had studied art under Salvo at Ridgefield High School.  

“The artists remember him as the rare teacher who treated them as adults and complained about the school administration,” The Times said. “The instructor remembers his former students, too, and regularly treks to their shows.”

Salvo was a longtime Ridgefield resident, living first on Rockwell Road and then on Oscaleta Road. He retired from teaching in 1996.

He was a member of the National Committee on Art Education of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the American Association of University Professors, and many arts-oriented organizations. He was listed in “Who’s Who in American Education.”

Over the years he had many shows of his own works, including at Silvermine Guild of Artists, Yale University,  and, of course, the Ridgefield Library.

Salvo was 77 years old and living in Guilford when he died.

Frederic Remington:

He Knew the Horse

Frederic Remington’s pictures and sculptures depicting the Old West are in countless museums and collections, and bring large prices: A sculpture in bronze, called “The Wounded Bunkie,” sold at auction for $5.6 million in 2008 while an oil painting, “A Reconnaissance,” fetched $5.2 million at a 1999 auction. 

Even postal people love him: Few Americans outside of presidents like George Washington have been so extensively remembered on United States postage stamps—at least six bear his art or his face.

Unfortunately for Remington, his stay in Ridgefield was brief. He died six months after arriving.

Though his fame is based on the Old West that he so colorfully documented, Frederic Sackrider Remington spent all but a few years of his life in the Northeast. He was born in 1861 in Canton, N.Y., son of a newspaper editor who wanted him to pursue that career. 

While he attended military schools in Vermont and Massachusetts, Remington found he loved to draw more than to write or fight, and he wound up attending the School of Fine Arts at Yale, where he also played football for the Bulldogs. His first published illustration was a cartoon of a “bandaged football player” for a student newspaper. 

He left Yale when his father became seriously ill and died. With an inheritance in hand, Remington decided against returning to college, and headed west in 1881 to seek adventure; he was only 19 years old. In the next few years, he traveled widely in the western states and territories, working as a cowboy, a sheep rancher, a saloon owner, a reporter, and at other jobs—all the while sketching what he was seeing. 

Around 1885, he came back east, studied at the Art Students League, and began an illustrating career with Harper’s Magazine in the days before photographs were common in publications. He returned to the West briefly to cover the Indian Wars in Apache country for Harper’s. By then, he was earning $1,200 a year as a commercial artist, a sizable sum at the time. “That’s a pretty good break for an ex cow-puncher,” he said. 

Remington went on to illustrate not only for magazines, but also books, and wound up writing a half dozen books of his own about the West. Virtually all of his illustrations, his paintings and later his sculpture dealt with the Western themes.  “I knew the wild riders and vacant lands were about to vanish forever,” he wrote. “And the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed.”

While he became widely praised as an illustrator, Remington wanted recognition as an artist. By the turn of the 20th century, he was devoting much of his time to painting and sculpture—and even burned many earlier works he felt were too much like illustrations.
Remington was living and working in New Rochelle, N.Y. when he decided he wanted a wilder environment. (Another noted New Rochelle artist-illustrator later did the same; Norman Rockwell moved first to Vermont, and later Stockbridge, Mass.) 

There are several stories about why Remington chose Ridgefield. One was that the town was recommended by his lifelong friend, Alonzo Barton Hepburn, with whom he had grown up in upstate New York; Hepburn, Chase Bank president, had recently built a mansion on High Ridge, called Altnacraig. 

Another explanation was that Poultney Bigelow, a close friend who was editor and founder of Outing magazine, had recommended Ridgefield for both its wildness and its sophistication. Bigelow lived in nearby New York State and probably knew the town from visits. 

Perhaps both Hepburn and Bigelow had talked up the town to Remington, who at the same time was being strongly influenced by the Impressionist movement—and a leading impressionist, J. Alden Weir, lived in Ridgefield and was often visited by Remington’s friend, Childe Hassam.

Remington wound up buying 42 acres along Barry Avenue on which he and his wife, Eva, designed a sizable home and a state-of-the-art studio that featured a huge fieldstone fireplace, and large (for the era) plate glass windows. The estate was known as Lural Place, according to his

Ridgefield Press obituary, but another source said he called it “One Hoss Farm.” After his death the estate became known as Oak Knoll, a name that has stuck over the decades since.
Remington moved into the home in July 1909. In December, he fell ill and was eventually diagnosed with appendicitis that developed into peritonitis. His condition was said to have been exacerbated by his treating himself with laxatives and the fact that he weighed 300 pounds. 

An emergency operation was performed at his house—reportedly on the dining room table. As The Press said at the time, “The artist rallied after the operation and it was believed he would recover. Complications, however, entered into the case on Saturday and the patient sank rapidly during the night.” He died Sunday, the day after Christmas. He was only 48 years old. 

During his career Remington produced more than 3,000 drawings, illustrations, paintings, and bronzes. “The extent of what he might have been was curtailed only by his untimely death at a time when he could have had 20 years of growth ahead of him, but he was already the paramount exponent of his kind of art and the most American of them all,” said biographers Peggy and Harold Samuels.

Remington loved riding and depicting horses in action, be it on canvass or in bronze. “When I die,” he told a friend not long before his death, “I want my epitaph to be, ‘He knew the horse.’” However, his spare gravestone in Canton, N.Y., bears only his name and the years of his birth and death.
In 1965, Remington’s house was declared a national historic landmark. The studio he had in the house has been reproduced in detail at the Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y., where his family once lived. 

For years, townspeople had wanted a road name recalling the artist. From shortly after his death until well into the 1950s, various movements tried to have Barry Avenue changed to Remington Road. In fact, a 1927 map of property along Barry Avenue called the highway “Remington Road.”
A new road at the1960s Westmoreland subdivision gave the town an opportunity to commemorate the artist: Remington Road runs between Barry Avenue and Peaceable Hill Road, intersecting Barry Avenue not far from Remington’s house. 

Perhaps the artist had gotten a chance to hunt on the Westmoreland estate during his brief stay here.—from “Hidden History of Ridgefield,” History Press, 2015