Daniel Chester French: Cornish

"Christmas Morning" by Maxfield Parrish

"Cornish was, in my day, and of course still is, a community rather than a village, a scattering group of houses among the New Hampshire hills. For the mail and for whatever small business affairs there were, we drove down long hills, and along flat river banks, and through an old ramshackle covered bridge, into the town of Windsor.

The places were lovely and unusual. There was none of the old-fashioned method of clearing off a tract of land, cutting down trees, filling up ravines, laying out roads between the house and the view. In other words, the taking out of everything that naturally grew there and putting in everything that was foreign.

I think of the sculptor, Herbert Adam's place how exquisite it was, and yet a house and a barn about sixty feet apart with a high fence connecting the two and painted white, a parallelogram of green inside, a few columns, a stone floor against the house, and am amphora or a colored relief against the white walls of the barn - one might have been in Italy or anywhere, and yet no effort, no expense, no display.

And of course Maxfield Parrish's place - a little rambling farmhouse on a hillside, as I remember it. We wandered up along a winding pathway, and there, in front of the house a few yards away and slightly lower, was the oval pool which he has made famous with blue waters and peaked Alps, recumbent maidens and youths.

Charles Platt's home was a kind of American Italy. The Tom Dewing house, low upon the road, with its little garden ablaze, as I remember it, with every shade of yellow, and upon the hill opposite, the Italian villa which Mrs. Johnston, then Miss Annie Lazarus had built and made beautiful.

Some of the artists used to say that Saint-Gaudens had the only real house in Cornish. It was a brick of the severe Colonial type, and had in the earlier days been a tavern. He had done everything to it that he could think of to make it as little like New England as possible. He had put an elaborate fence around the top of the bank with Greek heads at regular intervals, and a big, elaborate porch at the front to get that 'infernal Puritan look' out of it, which offended his Celtic soul. This porch looked towards Ascutney, as do most of the houses in Cornish, just as in Sicily they look toward Aetna, and in Japan towards Fujiyama."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)