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INDEXES ONPAGES 36 & 37Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, Connecticut

Inside The Salmagundi Club With

Newsstand Rate $1.75

October 9, 2015

NEW YORK CITY — Our acquaintance began inauspiciously.

“You probably think I’m dead,” said the voice at the end of the line.

I hesitated. The name was certainly familiar, an auction house staple, in fact. But which Wig-gins was this? He of the tranquil meadows and grazing livestock, or the urbane Wiggins, whose intimate Manhattan street scenes seem torn from the pages of The New Yorker.

The caller was in fact Guy A. Wiggins, burst-ing with vitality and inviting me to join him for lunch followed by a tour of New York’s Salma-gundi Club, one of the nation’s oldest arts orga-nizations. Of course, I said yes.

On the appointed day, I pounded on the mas-sive front door of the West Village brownstone that Wiggins shares with his wife of 57 years, Dorothy. There presently appeared a spry, nat-tily attired man, now 95. He waved me through before returning to the phone conversation he was having with art dealer Jeffrey Cooley, an expert in Old Lyme colony painters, among them my host’s father and grandfather, Guy C. Wiggins (1883–1962) and J. Carleton Wiggins (1848–1932).

The Wiggins enterprise began in the 1860s. Carleton Wiggins trained with landscape paint-

er George Inness, among others, and was exhib-iting at the National Academy by the 1870s. In the 1880s, he traveled to France. Heavily infl u-enced by the Barbizon style, he claimed a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1894. He was elected to the Salmagundi Club in 1883, serving as its president between 1911 and 1913. He died in Old Lyme, Conn., in 1932.

Successful from a young age, Guy C. Wiggins perfected loosely brushed views of town and country. It is frequently snowing in Guy C.’s New York, perhaps because the artist was a seasonal resident or maybe because snow softened Man-hattan’s angular geometry, making the obdurate metropolis more approachable. The public liked Wiggins’s traditional approach. Reviewing the painter’s solo show at the Morton Gallery in 1932, New York Times critic Edward Alden Jew-ell observed, “Mr Wiggins has done a good deal of experimenting without leaving in the lurch those of us who like their art pleasant and pic-turesque.”

“We’ve been in this house for 26 years. We bought it before the neighborhood was fashion-able,” my host tells me. His accomplished fl oral still lifes, a genre for which the fi rst two Wiggins

Guy A. Wiggins in the third-fl oor studio of his West Village townhouse.

Perpetuating a family tradition, the third in trio of noted painters champions American art and artists.

Guy A. WigginsBy Laura Beach

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Portrait of J. Carleton Wiggins by Albert Rosenthal (1863–1939), 1920, oil on canvas, 30 by 35 inches. Rosenthal was an American painter, lithographer, etcher and Salmagun-di Club member. Wiggins served as the club’s president between 1911 and 1913.

14C — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — October 9, 2015

“Cherry Blossoms in Greenwich Village” by Guy A. Wiggins, oil on canvas, 16 by 24 inches.

Publicity chairman Ilene Skeen, board chairman Tim Newton and Guy A. Wiggins in the parlor of the Salmagundi Club. Wiggins’s 2014 painting of New York’s Flatiron Building in winter is a recent gift from the artist. Above, “Plzen” by Thomas Loepp. Left, “Moonlight Audierne” by John Noble.

“Autumn at the Plaza Hotel” by Guy A. Wiggins, oil on can-vas, 18 by 24 inches.

The library’s most distinctive feature is a collection of mugs decorated by members, a tradition dating to 1897. The portrait of J. Sanford Saltus (1853–1922) is by George M. Reevs. A club patron and collector, Saltus died after swallowing cyanide. His mysteri-ous death was ruled accidental.

Paintings by Guy C. Wiggins and J. Carleton Wiggins hang throughout the Wiggins house.

Inside The Salmagundi Club With

Guy A. Wiggins

October 9, 2015 — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — 15C

were not known, decorate the hall and kitchen. “They’re here because they hav-en’t sold,” he says too modestly.

In an adjacent drawing room overlook-ing a private garden, a gilded screen above the fi replace is a souvenir from Ja-pan, where Guy Arthur served as a civil-ian under General MacArthur during the American-led occupation. A long career in public service, with periodic overseas postings, followed. Having shown early artistic promise, Guy Arthur — who in 1930 took the Wanamaker Prize for best drawing by a child — did not paint pro-fessionally until he retired from govern-ment in 1975.

Guy Arthur works primarily in oil and, like his father, frequently paints New York buildings, streets, cafes and parks, from Wollman Rink to the Brooklyn Bridge. His urban scenes have gaiety and wit, much like Wiggins himself. Scattered throughout the house are European views — Sintra in Portugal, Taormina in Sicily, the hills above Antibes in France — testifying to summers abroad with his wife and children.

We are soon joined by a stylish blonde. Dorothy Palmer Wiggins, who studied acting with Stella Adler and once, not inaptly, told a reporter that she was en-deared by her husband’s resemblance to Noel Coward and Leslie Howard, had re-turned from lunch with a friend.

“My mother had a house in Lyme and collected his father’s paintings. I knew his father, a dapper artist who wore yel-low shirts, before I knew my husband,” Dorothy recalls. The couple married in 1959 and has two children, Noel Carleton and Guy Stuart. Not suited by tempera-ment, as their father puts it, neither son paints professionally.

Guy Arthur was born in Lyme in 1920, near the height of father’s career. To make ends meet during the Depression, his parents started the Guy Wiggins Art School in Lyme. Young Guy sat in on weekly studio critiques and toted boxes of paint up a hill to a spot under a great oak tree where models posed for drawing sessions. He studied at what is now the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Conn. After his parents divorced, he moved to Los Angeles with his English-born moth-er and siblings. By then a young adult, he worked briefl y for Lockheed, took classes at UCLA, then enlisted in the Army in 1942. After the war, he pursued gradu-ate studies at Harvard before joining the Economic Cooperation Administration, charged with administering the Mar-shall Plan. A Ford Foundation fellowship led to further study at the London School of Economics, followed by research in In-dia.

“The biggest physical adventure of my life was driving overland to New Delhi through regions a good deal more dan-gerous now than they were then,” says

Wiggins, a traveler in the best British tradition.

As recorded in his unpublished mem-oirs, Wiggins’s early memories of his fa-ther’s colleagues — Charles Vezin, Bruce Crane, Ernest Lawson, Ivan Olinsky and Robert Vonnoh and his wife, Bessie Pot-ter, among them — remain vivid. Unable to sell his paintings during the Depres-sion, John Sloan wrote to museums, with little success, offering his work. George Luks’ beautiful Cuban wife made a deep impression on the adolescent, as did the intemperate Luks, a charismatic teacher who died after a barroom brawl. The only man Guy Arthur recalls his father taking an extended painting trip with was the hearty, bearded Wilson Irvine.

The Wiggins school folded during World War II. Its impresario went to work in Ivoryton, Conn., in a former piano factory requisitioned by the US Army Air Force, which commissioned Guy C. to paint the gliders it was assembling there.

Wiggins grabs his hat and the three of us descend to the street. Even in the col-orful enclave of the West Village, Guy and Dorothy are birds of rare plumage. Heads turn. A fi gure emerges from a doorway of-fering to hail us a cab for the short ride to the Salmagundi Club, since 1917 en-sconced in the former Irad Hawley man-sion at 47 Fifth Avenue, fi ve blocks north of Washington Square.

New York is a city of clubs, just as it is one of neighborhoods. Both make the

large and anonymous seem smaller and more manageable. Formed in 1871, six years after the Civil War ended, the Salmagundi Club then and now offers fellowship and support for working art-ists, along with instruction and friendly competition. The exact origin of its name — vaguely associated with the Salma-gundi Papers, a series of satirical essays written by Washington Irving with Wil-liam and James K. Paulding — remains in dispute. The club’s membership, which today numbers around 900 individuals nationwide, has over the years included everyone from Childe Hassam and Wil-liam Merritt Chase to Louis Comfort Tif-fany and Ogden Pleissner. Thomas Mo-ran, Emil Carlsen and Bruce Crane each served as president. Lay members — Stanford White and John Phillip Sousa, among them — have long been welcome.

We are met by at the club by its chair-man of the board, Tim Newton, accom-panied by Ilene Skeen, chairman of the public relations committee. Newton, who has worked to advance the organization, is eager to show me its newly refurbished fi rst fl oor galleries. We move past George Inness’s palette and brushes, displayed near the entrance, and through a parlor hung with selections from the Salmagun-di’s 1,500-work permanent collection.

“It’s an honor to serve such a presti-gious institution,” says Newton. When he

In 2014, the Salmagundi Club completed extensive ren-ovations of its Upper Galleries. In addition to hosting its own shows there, the club leases the refreshed space to other arts organizations.

A view of Taormina in Sicily is one of several paintings by Guy A. Wiggins that record impressions of family summers abroad.

Wit, humor — sometimes irreverent — and an affection for the people and places of New York characterize Guy A. Wiggins and his paintings, as suggested by “Hold-overs from The Age of Opulence,” his comment on the faded grandeur of the city’s architecture.

A wrought iron lantern with Salmagundi Club initials hangs in the grill room.

A gargoyle in the Salma-gundi Club bar has been loosely attributed to Phil-ip Martiny (1858–1927), a French-born New York sculptor responsible for the Abingdon Square Me-morial and other notewor-thy public commissions.

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16C — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — October 9, 2015

was fi rst introduced to the club in 2002, the galleries’ lighting and heating sys-tems were decades old. Air-conditioning was an afterthought. Walls and fl oors were worn. Familiar with the juried in-vitational exhibit organized by the Na-tional Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Newton, originally from the West, proposed the Salmagundi Club do something similar, reaching out beyond its membership to artists nationally.

The result is the club’s annual “Ameri-can Masters” show and sale, on view Oc-tober 5 to 23. A gala evening is planned for Friday, October 16, preceded, on October 14, by “Seeing in the Dark,” a panel dis-cussion for collectors moderated by Fine Art Connoisseur editor Peter Trippi and underwritten by the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center. This year’s theme is inspired by “Night Visions: Noc-turnes in American Art, 1860–1960,” at Bowdoin College Museum of Art through October 18. Loosely coinciding with “American Masters,” on October 9, 18 and 23 are three benefi t auctions of more than 200 works by members.

The Salmagundi Club presented its fi rst “American Masters” show in 2008. About $200,000 in proceeds from the show were applied to gallery renovations. Individu-al and foundation gifts accounted for the

balance of the roughly $1.5 million cost. The club unveiled its new galleries in April 2014, a little more than a year after construction began.

“Our fi rst ‘American Masters’ in the new space was a particular joy for me,” recalls Newton, who is especially proud of the sophisticated lighting system. “We can fl ood the walls for large, group shows or spotlight individual sculptures in the

round.” Having enhanced its galleries, the club rents them out. The Oil Painters of America, Audubon Artists and Ameri-can Watercolor Society are three groups of the ten or so planning shows here in coming months.

Contrary to its aura of privilege, the Sal-magundi welcomes the public, organizing a busy schedule of exhibitions and events open to all who are interested. One of its oldest and best known productions is its annual “Black and White” exhibition dating to 1878. Sargent, Whistler, Eakins and Homer all submitted work to the jur-ied show limited in palette but not media.

The fi rst Salmagundians enjoyed box-ing matches and sausages. While tastes have changed, the club’s tavern, grill and billiard rooms are still convivial places. A parallel taste for competition is on view in the dining room, where the club displays selections from its collection of prize-win-ning “Thumb Box” paintings. An annual tradition, the selling exhibition of paint-ings no bigger than an artist’s paint box this year runs from November 23 to Jan-uary 1.

“I look at this building of about 1854, the last standing mansion south of 124th Street on Fifth Avenue. The last one. Were it not for the foresight of our found-ers, it would be completely out of reach for artists and art lovers today,” muses Newton. Challenges remain. The club’s

chairman would like to see the third fl oor remodeled as additional galleries. The fourth fl oor would remain offi ces and storage space.

We visit the library, whose most dis-tinctive feature is a collection of pottery mugs decorated by J. Francis Murphy, Luis Mora, Chauncey F. Ryder and other Salmagundians. The tradition, begun in 1897 and encouraged by Charles Volk-mar (1841–1914), who worked in clay as well as paint and supplied members with blanks, no doubt stemmed from the late Nineteenth Century fetish for china painting. It is hard to imagine Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and today’s top artists getting together for a tipple and creative playtime.

The tour complete, we head for the door. Guy Wiggins promises to be in touch. He is a cherished fi xture of the Salmagundi Club, a living link to the talents and tra-ditions of its past. This subtle, nimble, en-tertaining man is what used to be called clubbable. He reminds us of the richness of community and of our growing es-trangement from it, a peril hastened by living too much in the virtual world. The remedy, it turns out, may be more places like the Salmagundi Club. The Guy Wig-ginses, alas, will remain in short supply.

The Salmagundi Club is at 47 Fifth Av-enue. For information, www.salmagundi.org. or 212-255-7740.

The Salmagundi Club dining room. Other facilities for relaxing in-clude the grill room and billiard room.

Guy and Dorothy Wiggins traveled widely before settling perma-nently in New York.

Included in the club’s annual “Thumb Box” show and sale of small paintings, this 1913 marine scene by Ar-thur J. E. Powell hangs in the club dining room.

Portrait of a child by Murray P. Bewley, Vezin Prize 1921, from the club’s collection of “Thumb Box” paintings.

“Charity” by Louis Jambor, Vezin Prize 1948, from the club’s collection of “Thumb Box” paintings.

Portrait of a woman in a garden by Rae Sloan Bredin, Vezin Prize 1922, from the club’s collection of “Thumb Box” paintings.

Guy A. Wiggins

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