Artist lived in North Adams, studied in Williamstown

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    Two of the paintings displayed as part of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s exhibition “Noble Dreams Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930,” are by an artist who lived for 10 years in North Adams and took art lessons in Williamstown.     That artist, Henry Siddons Mowbray, lived in North Adams because his adoptive father — actually his uncle — was George Mowbray, a chemist and expert on explosives, who blasted the Hoosac Tunnel through the Hoosac mountain range. The aspiring young artist took art lessons in Williamstown. And subsequently, when he was well established, he married, successively, two North Adams sisters.     H. Siddons Mowbray, as he signed his paintings, painted many smaller works, or easel paintings, but he went on, after 1890, to concentrate on murals, and these ornament venues such as the Pierpont Morgan Library and the University Club in New York City.     The two paintings on view at the Clark are The Calenders (1889), loaned by the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Rose Harvest (1887), loaned by the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, N.C.     Another easel painting, titled Le Repose, can be seen locally at the Park-McCullough House in North Bennington, Vt.     This artist with local ties was born Henry Siddons in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1858 to English parents. His father, who worked for a branch of a British bank, died soon after his son’s birth. And the boy was left an orphan when his mother, who had brought her young son to the United States to live with her sister and her sister’s husband, was burnt to death when an oilcan exploded as she poured its contents on a fire at the home of friends in Brooklyn, N.Y.     The boy was sent to Titusville, Penn., where he was adopted by his aunt and uncle. And that uncle, George Mowbray, used trinitroglycerine, an electric blasting fuse, and an air drill — all technological innovations at the time — to engineer blasting the tunnel through the mountain. Before his arrival here, in 1869, 195 lives had been lost in the attempt. His success at accomplishing the previously impossible, achieved the tunnel’s opening in 1873, shortening the distance between Boston and Albany, and improving the prosperity of North Adams.     During his youth in North Adams, where he moved at age 11, Mowbray attended Drury Academy, and was taught by Mary Hathaway, who noted his interest in art. The academy was located at the site of the present Conte Middle School. He spent a year at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but his interests were artistic rather than military.     During the winter of 1877-78, Mowbray took twice-weekly art lessons in Williamstown from A.C. Howland, a New York artist and member of the National Academy of Design. In his memoirs, Mowbray recounted that Howland’s studio was in an unused room in an old museum building of the college, the walls of which were lined with cabinets containing specimens.     “I never as long as I was taking lessons with him did more than copy his landscapes,” Mowbray later wrote.     An article in Art & Architecture magazine from July-August 1980, noted that A.C. Howland not only had years of formal training, but encouraged his pupil to study in Europe, as he himself had done.     Mowbray left for Paris in 1878 to further his career. Mowbray had not, in fact, found North Adams a congenial incubator for a budding artist. The only artist he remembered meeting there was the cartoonist Thomas Nast, who once gave a lecture in town. He recalled, with whatever degree of accuracy, that “a flat, deadly blanket of commonplace covered everything.”     In Paris, where he lived from 1878 to 1883, he studied at the Atelier Bonnat, he travelled, and he took his work for criticism to the noted artist Jean Léon Gérôme, whose exotic Near Eastern scenes were much admired. Gérôme’s The Slave Market and The Snake Charmer are perhaps the most striking images in the second room of the exhibition at the Clark.     In less than two years, Mowbray had a painting exhibited at the Spring Salon of 1880, and in 1883, two more. That spring he returned to the United States, settling in New York, but by 1885, he also had a studio in North Adams.     His paintings and drawings, many of them with Orientalist themes, were in demand. A work titled Attar of Roses was listed as the loan of North Adams industrialist A.C. Houghton for an exhibition of his work at the Knoedler gallery, at 355 Fifth Ave., in February, 1897.     In North Adams, he became reacquainted with an old schoolmate, Helen Amelia Millard, and married her in 1888. After her death in 1912, he married her younger sister, Florence Gertrude Millard, in 1915.     Beginning in 1886, he taught life drawing and painting at the Art Students League in New York and occasionally at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s classes. He also did illustrations for magazines such as Harper’s Monthly.     He also, according to his granddaughter Terry Eddy, interviewed by telephone from Connecticut, was friends with painters William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent, and with architect Charles F. McKim, of the prestigious firm of McKim Mead, White. Increasingly influenced by the Italian Renaissance, Mowbray turned to mural paintings, and through his friendship with McKim, received numerous commissions for important buildings. His first, in 1892, for decorating the Fifth Avenue mansion of Collis Huntington with allegorical depictions of concepts or disciplines such as Music, Literature, Tragedy, Comedy, Electricity, Astronomy, Painting, gained him a then-substantial fee of $7,000. Subsequently, he executed murals for the library ceiling of the University Club, designed by McKim Mead, White. He painted a mural on the ceiling of the east room of the Pierpont Morgan Library, and executed a small frieze in the appellate courthouse at the foot of Madison Avenue.     He also painted murals for the Federal Building in Cleveland and on the ceiling of the Gunn Memorial Museum in Washington, Conn., where he lived after 1898.     He also painted murals at St. John’s Church in Washington, Conn., and at St. Michael’s Church in Litchfield, both designed by architect Ehrick Rossiter.     He was director of the American Academy in Rome from 1903-04. In the early 1920s he returned to easel paintings, with scenes from the life of Christ, but his later years — he died in 1928 — were spent on mural commissions and administrative work for the American Academy in Rome and as a member of the National Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.     Showing a viewer through the exhibition at the Clark, guest curator Holly Edwards praised Mowbray’s technique, noting particularly the fresh, glowing skin of the girl in the foreground. A contemporary Scribner’s Magazine article about illustrators of the period, by Mowbray’s friend William A. Coffin, praised his simple arrangements and the gracefulness of his figures, a style different from that of his mentor, Gérôme, who filled his canvases with figures and architectural backgrounds. In contrast, Mowbray’s works focus on the central figures.     The Calenders — the title refers to wandering dervishes — said Edwards, is “totally contrived,” in that women listening to the high-hatted dervishes are “clearly American,” wearing kimonos rather than Middle Eastern garb, and “sprawling in an American kind of way.”     In her Art & Architecture story of 1980 on Mowbray as an easel painter, Gwendolyn Owens wrote that his easel paintings, which had been all but eclipsed by his murals, “seem more interesting and far more original than the artist’s later large-scale decorative schemes.”          Editor’s note: Informaiton provided by Linda Neville of North Adams, formerly curator of the North Adams Historical Collection at the North Adams Public Library, was also used in writing this story.          
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RFP Ready for North County High School Study

By Tammy Daniels iBerkshires Staff
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The working group for the Northern Berkshire Educational Collaborative last week approved a request for proposals to study secondary education regional models.
 
The members on Tuesday fine-tuned the RFP and set a date of Tuesday, Jan. 20, at 4 p.m. to submit bids. The bids must be paper documents and will be accepted at the Northern Berkshire School Union offices on Union Street.
 
Some members had penned in the first week of January but Timothy Callahan, superintendent for the North Adams schools, thought that wasn't enough time, especially over the holidays.
 
"I think that's too short of a window if you really want bids," he said. "This is a pretty substantial topic."
 
That topic is to look at the high school education models in North County and make recommendations to a collaboration between Hoosac Valley Regional and Mount Greylock Regional School Districts, the North Adams Public Schools and the town school districts making up the Northern Berkshire School Union. 
 
The study is being driven by rising costs and dropping enrollment among the three high schools. NBSU's elementary schools go up to Grade 6 or 8 and tuition their students into the local high schools. 
 
The feasibility study of a possible consolidation or collaboration in Grades 7 through 12 is being funded through a $100,000 earmark from the Fair Share Act and is expected to look at academics, faculty, transportation, legal and governance issues, and finances, among other areas. 
 
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