Last month I visited The Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn, New York. It’s a lovely old mansion on the north shore of Long Island in and around the areas known as the Gold Coast. That nickname was made popular by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel The Great Gatsby. Many of these homes were built and owned by millionaires all living the good life here.
This particular estate was owned by Henry Clay Frick, co-founder of U.S. Steel Corporation, in 1919. The Georgian mansion was a wedding gift for his son, Childs. The mansion home was built on land owned by William Cullen Bryant, and named Clayton. In 1969, the estate was purchased by Nassau County to be converted to the Museum of Art.
It was my first time at this museum and I wanted to see the current exhibit of original paintings by Norman Rockwell, the noted illustrator of the Saturday Evening Post and other periodicals. He liked to represent the everyday basic human experience in his art. “I paint life as I would like it to be,” he once said.
Spanning the decades of his career through several wars and painting styles. His realistic, painterly approach finally met up with the more modernistic styles of other artists in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The paintings were larger than I expected and utterly beautiful.
As I walked I was thinking that my heeled shoes were all wrong for a hike, but I kept going. The trees grew taller, the underbrush denser, and the sky was hidden the further I walked. It was beautiful and quiet. The sun sent it’s rays down through the trees to settle on fallen branches in the path. Serene and wonderful. Did I bring my sketchbook with me? Of course not!
