If I were to tell you that a small, economically depressed Mohawk Valley village, about 200 miles northwest of New York, is home to a museum rich in significant works by 18th- to early 20th-century American luminaries such as Gilbert Stuart, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and George Bellows, you’d probably say, as I did, “Who knew?”
The Arkell Museum at Canajoharie has now become somewhat less obscure, thanks to its loan of nine paintings—by William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam and Theodore Robinson, among others—to this summer’s popular “American Impressionism: Paintings of Light and Life” exhibition at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, about 30 miles away.
The sparsely attended Arkell recently saw an uptick in visitors thanks to this Cooperstown exposure, according to Diane Forsberg, its director and chief curator. Ms. Forsberg hopes that the recent spurt of interest in the Arkell may help her attract desperately needed financial support for a shoestring operation whose annual budget last year was down 45% from 2008. The museum currently lacks both a registrar and an education curator.
A precursor to the corporate art collections that flourished during the late 20th century, the museum opened in 1927 as the Canajoharie Gallery, established by Bartlett Arkell, founder and first president of the Beech-Nut Packing Co. (later Beech-Nut Nutrition Corp.). Arkell “did not use his collection to bolster his position in society,” according to Ms. Forsberg, and didn’t want his name on the gallery. (That happened after a 2007 expansion, 61 years after his death.) His intent, she said, was to create a refuge “filled with inspirational art that his Beech-Nut workers and all Canajoharie residents would view as their own.”
He also collected for a more pragmatic purpose—to promote his company’s products and the attractiveness of its rustic locale: After he purchased J.G. Brown’s “American Farmer” (1908), in the mistaken belief that it represented a Mohawk Valley landscape, Beech-Nut’s marketing department adapted the painting’s idealized image of a farmer leaning on a pitchfork, accompanied by his alert dog, for use in a gum advertisement that touted Canajoharie as “Flavor-Town.”
But last year the food company abandoned its longtime home for a new plant further east on the Mohawk River. Located across the street from the Arkell, the white-walled former Beech-Nut factory is a white elephant with a “For Sale” sign. “The Mohawk Valley is littered with empty manufacturing plants,” lamented the Arkell’s president, Charles Tallent, who does triple duty as the president of the adjoining local library and attorney for the village.
The Arkell’s financial footing was undermined by a 2006 flood that caused some $1.4 million in damage, fortunately sparing its art but creating a net loss of $375,000 after federal disaster aid and insurance reimbursements. The 2008 recession hit just after an $11 million expansion that added a large event space, two changing-exhibition galleries and office and storage space, but also higher operating costs. The museum is still paying off its construction debt. Desperate for income, it recently stopped offering free admission to visitors who are cardholders at the local library, which shares both the museum’s building and its governing board.
Like many recession-hit museums, the Arkell has coped by organizing temporary exhibitions from its own 480-piece permanent collection, supplemented by works from the local Arkell Hall Foundation, established by Bartlett Arkell’s sister. (The foundation lent three works of its own to the Fenimore show.) On view through Oct. 21 is an engaging display of American Impressionist watercolors and pastels, intended to complement the Cooperstown exhibition. Highlights include Mary Cassatt’s deftly sketched pastel “Portrait of Mathilde Valet” (c. 1890) and Childe Hassam’s luminous “Brush House” (1902), a pastel that shimmers and nearly dissolves in the sunlight.
The show also features a charming harvest scene, “The Pumpkin Patch” (1878), from the Arkell’s cache of 21 works by Winslow Homer. The museum is lending a tempestuous winter coastal view, “Watching the Breakers: A High Sea” (1896), to the Portland Museum of Art’s “Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine” (Sept. 22 through Dec. 30). And the Arkell hopes to mount its own Homer exhibition in 2014, in partnership with the Fenimore (which will show it first), culled from its deep collection and enriched by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s possible loan of a watercolor, “Inside the Bar” (1883), that was purchased by Bartlett Arkell and donated to the Met by his widow.
Also on view (through Jan. 5) is “Pastoral and Parkland: American Landscape Paintings,” which prominently features one of Ms. Forsberg’s favorites—George Inness’s “The Passing Shower” (c. 1860-68), a sweeping, idyllic landscape crowned by a double rainbow and gazed upon by an indolent shepherd, reclining on a grassy slope.
But for me, the most riveting display was neither of the enjoyable but qualitatively uneven temporary exhibitions. The unexpected richness of the Arkell’s collection is best appreciated in the densely hung, sky-lit, vault-ceilinged exhibition hall that formed the core of the original museum.
I was immediately arrested by a Gilbert Stuart portrait—not the Arkell’s “George Washington,” painted about 1820 (one of Stuart’s many copies of the dollar-bill image), but “Mrs. Thomas Bisse” (c. 1785), a symphony of sumptuously textured textiles, topped by a voluminous, gauzy bonnet that seemed incongruously elegant for this plain-faced matron.
An austerely attired gallery neighbor of the showy Mrs. Bisse is the austerely dressed “Portrait of Mrs. Stokes” (1903), the forthright, no-nonsense mother of the artist Thomas Eakins’s former pupil, Frank. The son deemed it a “good work, not a good likeness”—a critique often leveled at Eakins. At least this unflattering, mannish portrait survived. Eakins biographer Henry Adams wrote that the artist “gave a portrait of … Frank W. Stokes to his family, who destroyed it.”
Bartlett Arkell was drawn not only to the psychological acuity of portraiture and the soothing prettiness of American Impressionism but also to the gritty realism of the Ashcan School. Clustered together in the grand gallery are works by George Bellows, Robert Henri and George Luks. Like the bulk of Arkell’s purchases, these came from the now defunct Macbeth Gallery in New York, which specialized in American art and pioneered in exhibiting the Ashcan School’s unsparing portrayals of urban life.
In the midst of this improbable bounty, usurping an entire wall at the far end of the gallery, is a full-size copy of Rembrandt’s best-known masterwork, “The Night Watch,” which Arkell commissioned after having admired the original in the Rijksmuseum. “He wanted people to see what he had experienced when he went to Europe,” Ms. Forsberg explained. All but one other of the Arkell’s 21 Old Master knock-offs by copyist Martin Kopershoek were destroyed in the 2006 flood. (Most of the museum’s original art was, luckily, stored off-site during the expansion’s construction.)
The challenge now is to entice art lovers to experience these out-of-the-way riches firsthand. Ms. Forsberg dreams of teaming up with other art museums in the region—the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum in Utica and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse—to collaborate on cultural tourism.
“We need to let people know that this is a place to go when they’re on vacation,” Ms. Forsberg said wistfully.
-By LEE ROSENBAUM