Heritage Museums & Gardens | Temple of Virtue
In August 2024, I went on a five-day trip to Cape Cod, MA where I visited many museums and cultural organizations, along with quick history stops and trails. My first stop was Heritage Museums & Gardens (HMG) in Sandwich, MA. The first part of this six-part miniseries focused on the gardens, second part on J.K. Lilly III Automobile Gallery, the third on small buildings, and a fourth covering art installations on the grounds. This post focuses on the reproduction Temple of Virtue and the art exhibit inside.
In early 1783, the Continental Army under George Washington built a fort called New Windsor Cantonment in New York, which is now a state park with costumed reenactors. One of the buildings was known as the Temple of Virtue, and Washington used the space to give out Purple Heart honors to three soldiers, originally called the Badge of Military Merit. A few months later in April, the war ended. J.K. Lilly Jr., the museum founder, was a fan of firearms and military miniatures, so he had this replica built to store his collection. Apparently, those items proved less popular with the public, so the building now hosts the Special Exhibitions Gallery.
During my time at the museum, the show on display was Impressionist New England: Four Seasons of Color and Light. I had recently seen the work of some of the artists during my trip to the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT. Artists from the Old Lyme Art Colony, including Willard Leroy Metcalf, Childe Hassam, Wilson Henry Irvine, Charles H. Ebert, and William Chadwick had landscape oil paintings on display.
Other artists worked with the Mystic Art Association, including Peter Marcus, whose family had immigrated from Germany, and Charles Harold Davis. A few women artists were prominently featured, including Old Lyme Art Colony member Matilda Browne, Provincetown artist Nellie Augusta Knopf, and polio survivor Marguerite Stuber Pearson, who broke barriers as an artist with disabilities after a successful debut in 1924. An outlier was Dennis Miller Bunker, friend of John Singer Sargent and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was not a member of an art group due to his shocking death at twenty-nine years old.
The biggest surprise for me were the number of more recent artists featured in the gallery who continue to paint in the Impressionist style. Sam Barber had a special feature at the center of the room. He described his life and work in brief documentary, while a touchable display allowed visitors to feel the difference in brushstrokes between Impressionist painters and Realism painters. This is a fun experience for anyone, especially children at an art gallery for the first time, and allowed blind and visually impaired visitors to experience some of the art firsthand. The youngest artists in the exhibit were of my parents’ generation. Loretta Feeney was born in 1961 and studied under Barber for a short time. Doug Rough was born in 1964 and lives in Falmouth with his wife, Hillary Osborn, who is also a painter.
Besides the respite from the summer heat in the air conditioned building, this was a great opportunity to see more American Impressionists ahead of the Westerly Museum of American Impressionism opening up in the next year or so. The lighting in the gallery was inconsistent, as some angles caused shadows of the painting, and one wall had a combination of pink lighting and dark turquoise paint to create an usual and likely unintentional color overlay on the artwork. As always, the space could have used more seating and an audio version of the many well-written and informative signs on the wall. I look forward to seeing what else is in the galleries the next time I visit HMG.
