With the leaves changing and weather cooling down, Historic Deerfield is welcoming folks to two new exhibitions this fall aiming to tell the history of New England, while also exploring the feelings of nostalgia and beauty that shaped some of those stories.

At the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, the museum has opened up “In Pursuit of the Picturesque: The Art of James Wells Champney” and “Building a Collection: Recent Acquisitions at Historic Deerfield” for the fall season, as the museum explores the work of James Wells Champney in the former, while the latter brings together numerous aspects of Historic Deerfield’s collection.

The exhibitions will remain open through Feb. 23, 2025 and can be found at the Flynt Center, 37 Old Main St., in Old Deerfield. Historic Deerfield is open Wednesday through Sunday, as well as Monday holidays, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

‘In Pursuit of the Picturesque’

As you walk into the Flynt Center, you will see Historic Deerfield’s newest exhibition on James Well Champney, who was born in 1843 and died in 1903, and the paintings, pastels, photographs and material culture he left behind, totaling about 50 objects.

While not always included in the broader picture of American art, Champney’s depictions of New England life and sentimental scenes, as well as his home in Deerfield, helped cement him as the town’s resident artist during the 19th century.

Lea Stevenson, who curated the exhibition and is a Luce Foundation curatorial fellow in American paintings and works on paper, said Champney grew up in Boston, enlisted in the Civil War and then traveled to Europe to receive his education.

From there, he came back to United States as an illustrator and then began creating the nostalgic scenes he’s known for in the 1870s and 1880s. He also served as Smith College’s first art professor, which helped cement his roots here in the Connecticut River Valley. 

“That’s one of the questions driving this exhibition is how Champney created this nostalgic vision,” Stevenson said. “This is not just about sentimental, pretty pictures, but what’s kind of going underneath is he’s responding to the post-Civil-War moment, at this time, too, when more people are retreating into the past.”

By the late 1880s, though, Champney shifted into pastels and started making a name for himself in the art world with a 12-portrait series, “Types of American Girlhood,” which showed off women golfing, getting an education and cycling.

Throughout the collection, whether it’s an oil painting of folks on top of Mount Sugarloaf or a pastel of a young woman holding two white lilies, Stevenson said the goal of this exhibition is to reexamine Champney’s work and see how it promoted the Colonial Revival movement and how people were drawn to nostalgic rural scenes.

“Part of these scenes, I wanted to ask, who is he depicting, who is he perhaps erasing, is there a certain ancestry he’s privileging?” Stevenson said. “We had many pastels of white, young models, so I wanted to ask, why is he doing this? It’s really to privilege Anglo-American ancestry, or this nationalism coming out of the Civil War.”

Stevenson said the theme fits into Historic Deerfield’s ongoing initiative to take a look at different historical angles for its objects and try to pull out those unseen, and often untold, narratives that may have been passed over. Other examples include this year’s “Unnamed Figures” exhibition exploring Black representation and the 2022 partnership between the museum and the Witness Stones Project, which unveiled 19 bronze memorial plaques outside 12 houses to commemorate the enslaved men, women and children whose stories are often untold or buried by the sands of time. By the mid-18th century, enslaved people lived in more than one-third of the houses on Old Main Street.

The exhibition, of course, also provides some insight into the life of Deerfield during the period Champney was living and working there. Oftentimes, Stevenson said, Deerfield history is pigeonholed to the major events, like the 1704 attack on Deerfield.

“Champney kind of highlights that 19th-century Deerfield life was such an artistic center,” Stevenson said. “You had numerous painters working or coming up here seasonally … it shows the fine arts were very much thriving.”

“In Pursuit of the Picturesque: The Art of James Well Champney” contains works already in Historic Deerfield’s collection, as well as works and materials from other New England institutions, as well as private collections.

‘Building a Collection: Recent Acquisitions at Historic Deerfield’

Just down the hall at the Flynt Center is “Building a Collection: Recent Acquisitions at Historic Deerfield,” which brings together an array of the museum’s collections.

“This exhibition really does two things: it not only showcases recent acquisitions that the museum has acquired in the last five years, so 2019 to the present, but it also provides the how and why behind museum acquisitions,” said Historic Deerfield Assistant Curator Dan Sousa. “To illustrate that point, it is broken down into four sort of thematic sections that either emphasize how things maybe entered the collection or why we decided to add certain objects to the collection.”

Objects in the exhibition are arranged into the four sections of Exploring New Narratives, The 19th and Beyond, Building on Strengths, and Collectors and Collections.

Beyond the section designation, there is no exclusive theme among the objects. For example, in the Exploring New Narratives section, the museum has several items highlighting the deaf community in Deerfield, as well a Shaker table, showing off the wide range of topics covered by the museum.

“Deerfield has a very interesting history of the deaf community in town. We had students attend the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut,” Sousa said. “Trying to draw attention to deaf history, but also how deaf people were perceived during that time period … We try to tell those stories through objects like that.”

The exhibition also highlights the Deerfield Collectors Guild, which is a group of individuals that Sousa said “basically pull together their resources to help us acquire material that was perhaps made or owned or used here on the street, or some of the adjacent towns. A prime example of the guild’s work is Madeline Yale Wynne’s “Garden of Hearts” chest, which was acquired by the museum in 2023 and shown for the first time since 1903. The chest is centered right toward the center of the exhibition.

All tied together, the exhibition provides a deeper look at how an organization like Historic Deerfield acquires objects and how a museum’s priorities can influence what is currently on display.

“Its a tough balance to sometimes strike just because, not only us, but many museums are very hard-pressed for storage, or even exhibit space for that matter,” Sousa said. “As an institution, Historic Deerfield’s priority at the moment is definitely what you saw in the first section, is telling those narratives of those underrepresented communities.”

Stevenson added an exhibition like this can also show off the conservation work done by museums and other institutions.

Both exhibitions will be open at the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, 37 Old Main St., through Feb. 23. General admission tickets are $20 for adults, $5 for teens 13 to 17 and free for kids 12 and under. Deerfield residents also get free entry. For more information about Historic Deerfield, visit Historic-deerfield.org.