George J. Stengel: 

Impressionist Artist

George J. Stengel was an artist who spent his last years in Ridgefield and who was instrumental in the founding of one of the region’s major museums.

A native of Newark, N.J., Mr. Stengel was born in 1866  but moved as a child to Yonkers, N.Y., where he lived until 1920 when he moved to Ridgefield. At 14, he went to work for a Yonkers carpet manufacturer, Alexander Smith and Sons, and soon developed an interested in art. He attended night classes for two years while working days. The head of Alexander Smith recognized his artistic ability, and sent him to the famous Julian Academy in Paris, where he studied for two years. 

When he returned, he joined the carpet-maker’s design department, which he led for many years until his retirement in 1920. In his free time, Stengel painted, mostly country scenes in the impressionist style he had learned in Paris where, among his Julian classmates was Childe Hassam. 

In Ridgefield he and his wife, Grace Varian, moved to lower Main Street in Ridgefield,  a house almost opposite Rockwell Road and known as the "Hoyt Place." Stengel remodeled the house and transformed the barn in the rear of the house into a large artist's studio. 

He spent his retirement painting and was a frequent exhibitor at art galleries in the metropolitan area. He was widely known for his paintings of Mexico, which he and his wife had visited. 

He was a member of the Salmagundi Club and the Guild of American Painters. 

In 1916, he and noted sculptor Isidore Konti founded the Yonkers Art Association. Eight years later, the association petitioned Yonkers’ city council to turn the Glenview Mansion, overlooking the Palisades, into the Hudson River Museum. “The members of the Association were instrumental in convincing the city of Yonkers to use the beautiful Glenview Mansion as a museum,” said art historian Thomas C. Folk. “The newly organized Hudson River Museum opened its doors in December of 1924 with the ninth annual exhibition of the Association. Although the Yonkers Art Association no longer exists, the museum is thriving, and is an important part of Stengel's legacy.”

The museum is the largest in Westchester County.

Stengel died on November 31, 1937. “Stengel’s body of work is amazing for the quality and quantity he produced in about a twenty-year period toward the end of his life; achieving the dream of a career in the fine arts following a successful career in design,” Mr. Folk said.

Today his paintings can fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction.

Tammis Keefe: 

An Artist of the Cloth

Tammis Keefe lived in Ridgefield only four years, but they were her last four years and the acclaimed fabric artist chose the town to be her final resting place.

Born Margaret Thomas Keefe in 1913 in Los Angeles, Calif., she was called Peg by her family but preferred Tammis, which is Gaelic for Thomas. She studied at the Chouinard Institute of Art (now part of the California Institute of the Arts), and went to work for the Disney studios. She later became art director of the “Arts and Architecture” magazine, and in the late 1940s began designing handkerchiefs for Kimball scarves. 

“Handkerchiefs are fun to do, and I try to make them fun to give,”  she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1949.

By the mid-1950s, Ms. Keefe had become one of the first women fabric designers whose signature appeared on her work, mostly handkerchiefs, linen kitchen towels, tablecloths, and scarves. Lord & Taylor purchased a full-page advertisement in The New York Times for a “Meet the Designer” day to introduce her and her fabrics. She was featured in many newspaper articles, magazines and books. 

She produced some 400 designs for handkerchiefs and at least 100 for dishtowels, “all featuring her trademarks of unexpected color and subtle wit,” reports the website TammisKeefe.com

She herself described her textile designs as a “happy marriage of the past and the present, with a healthy respect for the future.”

Ms. Keefe came to Ridgefield in 1956, making her home on New Road with author and ad executive Jane Trahey. She died four years later at the age of 46 and is buried in St. Mary Cemetery.

Long after her death, she has been rediscovered through inclusion in events such as “A Woman's Hand: Designing Textiles in America, 1945-1969,” an exhibit of work by women designers at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2000. Her work is now in many collections and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Design Museum, the Henry Ford Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.