Daniel Garber: Beginnings

"Tohickon" by Daniel Garber

"'Garber's art has too few faults,' complained a newspaper critic in 1921, and the same might be said about his life. Serious, hard-working, sensitive, exquisitely competent, Garber made paintings the way he created his beautiful world on the Cuttalossa Glen. Hailed as the Dean of Pennsylvania painters, Garber could rest at the end of his life and point proudly to a long list of his works in important American collections, an awesome assemblage of medals, a distinguished roster of students, a handsome crowd of great-grandchildren and a thriving flock of sheep. Said Garber, 'I am a very happy man!'

The prospect of a happy and successful artist, dedicated to the pursuit of beauty and excellence, is delightful. Stocky, not very tall, ruddy-faced and just past seventy, he has all the appearance of a country squire. Without restlessness, eccentricity and anguish, Garber presents, at first view, the image of a model artist who rejects (or perhaps conquers) all the modern conventions of artistic behavior.

Born on a farm near North Manchester, Indiana, on April 11, 1880, Garber was the youngest son of a Mennonite family that traced its roots back to Pennsylvania-German immigrants in the middle of the eighteenth century. His upbringing gave him habits that indirectly influenced his painting and established the entire tone of his career. But 'looking back to that early and very simple way of life, Garber found it hard to explain just what motivated his desire to be an artist,' commented a journalist in 1940. Even the walls of his parents' home were bare of pictures or decorations.' His pictorial impulses remain a topic of much wonderment, even among the family members.

The Mennonites less successfully instilled respect for orthodox religion, however, for Garber stopped going to church at the age of ten. But much later, he would lovingly touch a small blossom from his garden and growl at his daughter, 'You only have to look at a flower to know there's a God!'

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)

Ella Condie Lamb: Passing On

Ella Condie Lamb

"Don't let my work hang like chain boxes around your neck.' So stated Ella Condie Lamb to her daughter toward the end of her life. Out of some need to release her children from the weight, the obligations, the sheer mass of the past, and from all the needs and wants of the previous generation, Ella had spoken.

But her children valued her art and did keep many of the private works they loved. Katharine reminisced, 'I remember when we were sorting through her things I'd look and say, 'I think I'd like that.' But then, I'd think, 'You can't keep too much. I'll just have to remember in my mind.' Ella would have been satisfied with that. Immortality was not necessary to her. To be an artist had been enough.

At some moment during the winters of her last years, Ella gazed intently through the large bay window of her beloved country home with her keenly observant artist's eye. She wrote: 

'As I look into the woodland it is as if a mighty painter had taken a brush with white paint, and yet not white, and dragged it across the soft gray, rough dry background, or canvas. Against this are the dark accents of tree trunks of all sizes and angles and curves with branches crossing and recrossing in a lovely tangled composition - each branch twig or tassel on the tips, each bush and weed with its line or cover of whiter snow - dark and light accents growing softer and softer until again merges into the grayness beyond... There is no wind. It is a white world, the snowflakes still drifting down.'

She died at The Fold one night in January of 1936 as a blizzard raged outdoors. She had had terrible neuralgia, a stabbing pain, that was just agony for her. This time she didn't survive it. Perhaps she had had a stroke. No one was able to reach Ella in time. The funeral was held at The Fold. Grandchildren Tony and David remembered it well.

'Her coffin was in the living room,' Tony recalled, 'I was really upset, I remember crying. Before the coffin was closed, Appa put in some kind of plaque or medal that Amma had won. It was something he thought was very important to her career.'

Charles lived six more years.From his wheelchair, he wrote letters to newspapers and to his children. He also made substantial notes for an autobiography. She had left him with a letter saying,

'The wind is howling tonight, but it makes me think of the old hotel in Bruges and our wedding trip. Dear, I wonder how many wedding trips are the introduction to as happy a life as ours. Hope you have been happy in spite of all the cares and anxieties - With much love, your wife'"

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)

Ella Condie Lamb: Changing of the Guard

"The Miniature Painter"
by Ella Condie Lamb

"Then came Black Thursday, the stock market crash of 1929, and the J. & R. Lamb Studios faced bankruptcy. That same year, their beautiful prize window from the Paris Exposition of 1900, 'Religion Enthroned,' was given to the Brooklyn Museum by Irving T. Bush.

In 1947, the Lamb's oldest son, Karl, wrote an account of the grave situation the Studios faced at this time and the steps he took to save the business and provide for Ella and Charles in their last years. He had been pursuing a career in chemical engineering  when he took over the Studios 'with much trepidation and anxiety.' He would guide it through financial crises and reorganization, meeting Charles' mounting medical and nursing bills, often borrowing heavily.

Karl's account describes the situation he had to face:

'Father was very sick with inflammatory progressive arthritis. Soon he was flat on his back for three months, and more or less crippled from then on. Father was helpless as there was no one remaining to carry on J. & $. Lamb...

I went into J. & R. Lamb with much trepidation and anxiety. Father, with all his wonderful personality and fine artistic conceptions got himself and the firm into various kinds of difficulty in later years. I had to find large sums of money for him, much more than normal, due to his illness and rapidly increasing incapacitation, which became complete several years before his death. The burden became unbearable and almost impossible by 1934...'

Karl managed to provide the income necessary to support his parents. Ella lived at The Fold until her death, as did Charles for several more years. For two years, Karl supported his own family 'by virtue of having sold some patents he had developed.' Charles wrote Karl: 'I want you always to remember, dear boy, what mother said of you. She called you a 'Rock in the Wilderness.'

Suffice it to say that the Studios recovered under Karl's direction and continued to produce many fine works. The Lamb's daughter, Katharine, gained recognition as one of the finest stained glass artists in the United States, working at the Studios until she was 83 years old."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)
 

Ella Condie Lamb: The Aftermath of War

"Donald" by Ella Condie Lamb

"At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Armistice was signed. Ella was overjoyed and added a P.S to one of her letters,

'The whistles are blowing, the chimes are ringing, sirens tooting like mad! Oh, Karl, waht does it mean? Katharine has rushed out to get a paper and some news - The German envoys were to be received by Foch this morning.... After four years at last it is over! They are not killing anyone now, and before the sun has set in France the Great War is in the past tense.... I think we cannot quite grasp the idea yet, our minds are paralyzed by the precious conditions.'

No more wars - not ever again!

However, her oldest son Karl was not coming home right away He had been assigned to the Army of Occupation and he was on the move across France into Belgium. In February, 1919, he cabled from Paris that he had been appointed to the Belgian Peace Commission. He wrote, 'I was chosen as the executive officer and assistant chief... Our job is one of the biggest and most difficult. It is the estimation of damage to all industries of the entire country...'

Ella sensed the chaotic times ahead, both for the country and the family and she wrote of these to Karl. It was hard for their second son, Donald, to adjust to civilian life. She knew Donald was disappointed that he had been made a flight instructor and, therefore, never sent to Europe to fly in combat and so to have the opportunity, as he said 'to make good over there.' Youngest son Condie also felt frustrated that he had not had a larger role in the war. He complained to Ella that he had not enlisted in the Navy early enough. Katharine, their daughter, felt that because she was a girl she was unimportant and was neglected in comparison to the boys. Ella pleaded to Karl, 'Do give some brotherly advice! I have my hands full!'

Perhaps from a sense of relief and release, and in a fine but controlled 'frenzy,' Ella painted each of her children wearing their uniforms, taking only four hours to execute each one. Possibly she wanted to assure them that the contribution of each was of equal value. In later years all of the children remarked on the speed with which she executed these portraits and the superb likenesses she achieved."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)

Ella Condie Lamb: Outdoor Painting

"October Blue and Gold" by Ella Condie Lamb

"In December of 1917, the year in which Ella Condie Lamb wrote of the 'terror and 'dread' in her heart because of the War, she mounted an exhibition of twelve 'Garden Paintings and Landscapes' at The Touchstone Galleries; it was a selection of outdoor work. From her childhood Ella had loved nature and sketched it. 

But it took the encouragement of a dear English friend, Lester Rolfe, in 1915 to return her to a more concerted effort to paint outdoors. Not only Ella but the children as well went out sketching in the fields. In the midst of the inner turmoil caused by the war, it was a restorative - a comfort and a joy with its range of color, detail and infinite variety of forms and light.

One reviewer of her exhibit, from the 'American Art News,' noted that 'Mrs. Lamb is especially fond of silver birches, and these she has painted in their changing aspects throughout the year. Probably the most striking of her paintings is 'The Blue Valley.' This picture has silver birches in the foreground, and a wonderful effect of distance looking out over the valley. As a whole, Mrs. Lamb's exhibition is extremely charming and intimate.'

Ella's landscapes are not grandiose canvases - perhaps she had enough of executing works of great size in her mural work. Her visions are intimate and are expressive of her sympathetic response to her immediate environment or of her need to express freedom. They are fully three-dimensional - having none of the flat, two dimensional design aspect which she was constantly required to use in her professional work. To use perspective in her landscapes was for her a release."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)

Ella Condie Lamb: "The War Bride"

"The War Bride" by Ella Condie Lamb

"The loneliness of the months to follow I dread. I must live from day to day, from letter to letter, work and dream of the future when this bitter war is finished - when the world is free. God keep them, and all sons, in His Hand. And I must work, work, work..."

Ella Condie Lamb wrote these words in her diary in 1917. On April 6, 1917, the United States had declared war on Germany, officially entering World War I, and soon afterwards their son Karl was sent to France as a captain in the Gas Defense section of the Chemical Warfare division; Donald was training to be a pilot in California, and Condie had joined the Navy and was in training at Cornell.

Ella and Charles were experiencing the intense, anxious life of parents whose family was disrupted and disoriented by war. Her letters to Karl describe her worries and feelings of dread, telling her eldest son all that was in her heart and all that was taking place at home, including the shock of seeing the returning wounded soldiers, often crippled and sometimes blind. She wrote to one of her sons every day. She wanted to be cheerful, but could not keep silent about the tragic deaths of the sons of friends and the crippling of many young men.

Her personal revolt against war's glamorization took the form of an allegorical painting, described in "Art and Archeology:"

'There was issued from Washington the request to all American Artists to give visible expression to the cause for which American troops were sent to fight overseas. The invitation was received by Mrs. Lamb in her New York studio and accepted seriously because her three sons had entered the service. 

To Mrs. Lamb, therefore, the thought of what war meant to the sacrifice of the family, took the form of 'The War Bride,' who, with the baby the young father overseas had never seen, looks away from the morning paper which rests on her knees, and wonders whether the father will ever come back to see his child. Her wonderment takes the form of a vision of the father in his uniform, with the figure of nation personified behind him and pointing to the crucifix which hangs on the wall behind the bed, as emblematic of the possible sacrifice which must be made on the part of many to realize the hope of the freedom of the world.'

Her painting was exhibited on Fifth Avenue for the Liberty Loan Drive in the windows of Marcus Jewelers, where it 'was the whole thing.' and then at Macbeth's Gallery. People felt that it was 'very impressive and beautiful, the kind of thing that has large and universal significance.'

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)

Ella Condie Lamb: How Did She Manage?

"The Open Book" by Ella Condie Lamb

"One cannot help but wonder how the artist Ella Condie Lamb navigated her way through the sea of demands inevitably created by household, family, and social life. Somehow she found a way to sail her artistic ship. By 1901 she and Charles had had four children and she had produced a great deal of work. The last child, Condie, was born in 1900, soon after the completion of the mosaic mural for Sage Chapel at Cornell. There were now two households to manage, one in New York and one in Cresskill. 

Her children remembered how. 'It took hard work,' wrote Karl. 'It took determination, an orderliness of mind, spirit, and character; and of course, a great love of what she was doing.' 'She set a certain time to work,' said Donald:

'She was very disciplined about that... I remember the lists. It's amazing how much she did do. But she did have help. Mother at that time had a cook, a maid, and a mother's helper. Three, always. This was when, as I remember, she locked herself in the studio, nine to one.'

She wrote to a Mr. Wood, who had asked how she had managed to lead the life of a professional artist while caring for family and household:

'My dear Mr. Woods, My answer to your question in regard to mothers continuing their work without neglecting their children is too long for me to 'jot down' as it is one I have had to solve for myself. A wife and mother can continue her work, but it depends upon the woman, the kind of work desired, and certain conditions.

The exceptional woman can do it. It would be harder for a musician or actress or any profession involving tours away from home or for a businesswoman with longer hours, than for a writer or artist, personally I cannot do more than three or four hours a day of concentrated creative work, which leaves plenty of time for the family.

The conditions are

1. perfect health and steady nerves
2. adequate training before marriage, not only in her own profession so that work can be attacked quickly and skillfully but also in the science of motherhood
3. great system and executive ability so that no time need be wasted or strength squandered and the ability to jump into work when the opportunity comes.
4. means to secure house workers and train assistants to supervise the children, and good schools
5. power to limit oneself to these two interests
6. last, but by no means least, the husband who is in sympathy with his wife's aspirations and a source of inspiration and help to her, as she should be to him..."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)