The Hudson River School Is Still Alive In Sandy Hook

By Shannon Hicks

When Fred and Joan Dwyer moved into their new house in Sandy Hook a few years ago, the first thing they wanted to do was make the brand-new dwelling feel like a home. Furniture and lighting were some of the first big steps taken, but then the Dwyers started looking for the personal touches that would make this house different from any other they have lived in to date.

When it came time to decorate their formal dining room, which is to the left of the building’s main entrance, the couple wanted something personal. They didn’t want to just put a few coats of paint on the wall, hang a chandelier, and call it a day. They wanted something a little different.

The couple first began toying with the idea of a large-scale landscape using wallpaper. The Dwyers had the concept of the Hudson River School in mind when they began considering the look they wanted for the formal room, but it looked like they might be out of luck when they started shopping around.

“Years ago you could buy mural wallpaper, but that seems to have gone out of style,” Mr Dwyer said. As a result, the couple began looking for an artist who could create a large-scale work of art specifically for their dining room. Mrs Dwyer remembered reading something about Rosemary Barrett, a Sandy Hook resident who had won awards for doing just that — on-site murals — and decided to contact the artist.

Mrs Barrett has been doing trompe l’oeil (literally, “deceiving the eye”) works on large and small scales for years. She has painted pieces of furniture, added texture such as wood or marble to decorative pieces that were built of different material, and has done full murals for businesses and corporations. She has won recognition and awards for her talent as both a painter and a sculptor, including two large awards from Society of Creative Arts of Newtown since May 2000.

Somewhere along the way, Rosemary Barrett’s name caught the eye of Joan Dwyer. Mrs Dwyer contacted the Sandy Hook resident soon after she and her husband realized they weren’t going to have any luck finding the wallpaper, Hudson River School style or otherwise, they had hoped for.

Hudson River School was the first American school of landscape painting. It was active during the years 1825 to 1870. The style became very popular because it provided what Americans craved: dramatic and uniquely American landscapes. Hudson River artists loved the American wilderness because it was land that was still untainted by man.

The style has also been referred to as Romantic Realist, because artists painstakingly included details in their grand land- and seascapes. After meeting with the Dwyers, Rosemary Barrett found inspiration in the work of William Trost Richards (1833-1905), an American painter who specialized in both types of scenes.

Before she begins painting on a wall, Ms Barrett presents clients with a color rendering of what their mural is going to look like when it is completed. The scene the artist and the couple agreed upon offers a view from atop a hill, looking over a pond on the left and a millhouse on the right.

Rosemary’s original rendering of the scene showed a millhouse on the edge of the water, but that troubled Fred Dwyer too much.

“It just didn’t make sense to have a mill there, where there wasn’t a stream leading into it,” the homeowner recently explained. So the millhouse became an icehouse.

Three cows are seen in the lower left of the scene, and a tree wraps itself around the right corner of the work, from the main wall of the dining room and onto a secondary wall. The cows are so realistic, in part, because of Ms Barrett’s background; the artist grew up on a farm.

“The trees going around the corner and over the door [on the secondary wall] soften the corners more than having the mural just end would have,” Ms Barrett explained. The painting measures 16 feet long by five feet tall.

A number of William Trost Richards paintings seem to hold key elements for the final compilation Ms Barrett and the Dwyers came up with. “Trees Along Stream in Fall,” an 1861 oil on canvas, “The Valley of the Brandywine, Chester County, (September),” done circa 1886, and “Sundown at Centre Harbor, New Hampshire,” a work from 1874 with watercolor, graphite, and gouache on green wove paper all offer elements that could have inspired Ms Barrett earlier this year.

Yet it also seems Richards’ 1874 watercolor and gouache on paper called “Long Pond, Foot of Red Hill” really seems to have done the trick, especially with its trees seeming to wrap themselves around the right edge of the painting.

Rosemary started work on the mural on March 21. She first used an oil-based glaze, a very pale blue-green with a hint of gray, to cover the entire room. Then the work on the mural itself began.

Five weeks after starting at the Dwyer home, Rosemary put the final touches on her latest work of art. Unfortunately, this is one masterpiece she is going to be able to see regularly only through pictures and videos.

 

Future Viewings

Of The Barrett Mural

The Dwyers moved into their brand-new home about five years ago. Fred Dwyer opted for early retirement from the corporate world eight years ago, and soon after that the couple decided to make another change, this time into a new home. Mr Dwyer began working on the design for a new home, and then the Dwyers’ son-in-law drew up the formal plans.

Mrs Dwyer is a tennis pro with students as young as age 2½. She offers lessons at her home as well as at Rock Ridge Country Club in Newtown. She is US Professional Tennis Association certified.

Mr Dwyer is now devoting more of his time to photo and video services. While Rosemary Barrett was painting the mural, in fact, every brush stroke and conversation was documented for a future documentary Mr Dwyer is now in the process of editing.

The work was filmed on digital video, and Mr Dwyer is hoping to produce a video that can be shopped to public television stations. It may also prove to be a valuable tool for Ms Barrett.

“I can show clients exactly what the process looks like at each step, especially how things do not always look great at every step,” she said.

 “People walk in to where I’m working sometimes and I can just tell by the look on their face that they’re, well, concerned, at what their room looks like,” she said.

In addition to being something for Mr Dwyer to show on television or other outlets and for Mrs Barrett to have for future clients, watching herself work was an eye-opener for the artist, who comes from a family of talented people.

“One of the most amazing things, to me, was when I watched that video,”_Ms Barrett said recently,_“it looked like I was actually watching my sister’s hands and not my own. That was really cool for me.”

Now that the mural has been completed the Dwyers and Ms Barrett have found more than a new client-employee relationship. The trio has also found a new friendship.

“Now that the mural is done,”_Joan Dwyer said recently, “we really miss having her around every day.”

“This whole process has been amazing,” Fred Dwyer added. “Watching that wall go from a blank white space into this living, breathing thing has been something else.”

“It’s wonderful,” Joan Dwyer agreed. “We just wanted this room to say something and now it does.”

Rosemary Barrett can be contacted by calling 270-0570.