But they would have been a bitch to heat

One thing that most Americans do at some point in their lives is something I've never done, or had any desire to do: own a house. Since I left home at 18 I have been a life-long renter, and that has been just fine with me. You couldn't find a monthly mortgage as low as many of the rents I've paid over the years, and I haven't had to worry about paying taxes, or insurance, or taking care of repairs, or other major maintenance situations (in two of the four houses I've rented in my life, I did take care of minor repairs...or rather, my handyman husband did).

Given my indifference to the very idea of owning my own home, I find it interesting that one of my favorite things to do is visit old homes that have become museums. I love looking at the size and layout of the rooms -- so often, even though a house may look large from the outside, the rooms really are not big at all, especially when you consider the large families and the voluminous skirts people generally went in for in the olden days -- the furniture, the knick-knacks (despite having no use for knick-knacks in my own home), the dishes and other kitchen utensils that might be on display, the arrangements for using the toilet, for taking a bath (my favorite example of the former was an elegant wooden "throne" in the master bedroom of an old plantation house in New Iberia, Louisiana, whereas my favorite bathroom was at Waddesdon Manor near Aylesbury, England -- the single round window had a stunning view of a huge, beautiful fountain in the center of a formal garden). I love the staircases, all the fireplaces -- even though I know they did a lousy job of keeping the inhabitants warm -- I love imagining what it might have been like to live in these houses.

On my trip to Rockland in early October (Notes of Oct. 11 and 19), between the main building of the Farnsworth Art Museum, and the converted church down the street that houses the Wyeth Center, is the Farnsworth Victorian Homestead. The last member of the well-to-do Farnsworth family bequeathed the building that became the art museum to the town, as well as her family home, with the stipulation that everything in the later structure remain essentially as it was. Although Lucy Farnsworth died in 1935, unmarried and childless at the age of 97; the house had been very little changed from the mid-1800s when it was built; thus, visitors are, indeed, able to see a comfortably middle-class "Victorian homestead."

There was the "second parlor," which was actually the room the family spent the most time in, where guests were routinely received -- the 1800s' equivalent of today's den or family room. This was a good example of what I was saying about rooms not being as large as you would think they would need to be. Across the hall was the formal parlor, much larger, much more "elegant" (actually quite ugly, in that way attempts by the Victorians to be elegant could be). Two of the most interesting rooms were for the servants, the housemaid and the hired man. Upstairs, back of the house over the kitchen, with a nearby stairs leading down to same. Small, very spartan rooms, especially the hired man's. I think about the maid, cleaning the bedrooms of the family -- so much roomier, and more attractive -- did envy ever tug at her brain stem? Or was her situation such that she could only be grateful to have a live-in position (one afternoon off a week), with her own room, small and plain though it was? The Everything's Relative Sydrome...

The one question I had for the two pleasant ladies who were serving as "guards" was, why was the cast iron stove in the kitchen so low?! It seemed almost like a toy. The ladies explained to me that Lucy had been quite short, not even five feet tall, on top of which, the pots and skillets they used back then were quite heavy, and the higher the stove, the more difficult to maneuver them. This answer left me a little skeptical, since surely Ms. Farnsworth had someone to do the cooking. This was a well-to-do lady, after all, in a time when servants were common. But maybe the cook was pint-sized, too.

Interestingly, this stove had a contraption connected to it that used the heat from the stove to produce hot water, which was then pumped to the one bedroom downstairs (which in her old age became Lucy's), and to one of the bedrooms upstairs...that of one of the sons. Lucky, spoiled so-and-so.

The Wyeths have it

At the Farnsworth, I quickly lost interest in our guided tour, and set out exploring on my own. The modern works on display in the ground floor galleries were for the most part Robert Indiana's smooth, brightly colored word sculptures -- LOVE, HOPE, EAT -- which are blandly pretty. Much of the art in the exhibit American Art Between the Wars --paintings done by artists working in Maine from the late 1890s to the early 1940s (which is not my idea of "between the wars") was not very good, looking clumsy, amateurish. These were disappointments, but the Tribute to Andrew Wyeth exhibit, while small, was excellent; several wonderful paintings by this adopted son of Maine (he was actually from Pennsylvania, but spent most of his childhood summers on the mid-coast of Maine) that I'd never seen before. One, called The Belfry, was almost surrealistic -- a small church belfry, with little birds flying all around it...sitting on a table in an old attic. Another, called Room after Room, has an interesting perspective: the viewer is looking through an open doorway at a woman in a chair, with another open doorway beyond her, leading into another room. But that wasn't what I found most fascinating about the picture. Rather, it was Wyeth's perfect depiction of the old wood of the walls (the setting is, as often in Wyeth's paintings, an old farm house). The different shades of brown, of grey, of blue, produced a texture: rough, old wood.

One of my favorite courses in college was my Survey of Art course. It did exactly what a liberal arts course should do: broadened my horizons, introduced me to new possibilities, new ways of looking at the world. One of the most memorable lessons I got from that course was that paintings are not really "that which is represented," they're paint. The instructor, with whom I had endless arguments about what is art? (I called myself the class philistine, but really I was just the one with petit bourgeois tastes who spoke up), would have us go stand close to a painting, so close that the picture was essentially lost; all we could see was the paint. And that's what he wanted us to see; he wanted us to understand that these marvelous effects we got -- these pictures we saw -- when we stood back and admired them from a distance, were first and foremost paint, put on the canvas by a person who was hoping to convey through that paint what he was seeing, or what he was feeling about what he was seeing, or simply what he was feeling. Getting this glimpse of the nuts and bolts of the artist's work vastly increased my respect for what artists do, though I have always been a big appreciator of their finished products.

To this day I still walk up close to paintings in an art museum and look at the paint. This is how I could see the greys, the blues, the different shades of brown, in Wyeth's Room after Room. A marvel.

The museum also owns a old, converted church a block away, that is now the Wyeth Center, dedicated mainly to revolving works by Andrew's father N.C., and his son James, more commonly referred to as Jamie. Here I was surprised to find that the illustrations by N.C. (and I swear I never knew that N.C. Wyeth's first name was Newell), didn't do much for me. I realized I much preferred the sometimes melancholy, subdued-tones depictions of old farmhouses, old farmhouse windows, of his son. The most interesting thing I heard the guide say on the tour I abandoned was that N.C. was always after his son to put more color into his paintings. But the old man was wrong.

Light in the rain

I was somewhat disappointed that the lunch that was included with our train excursion to Rockland was not a seafood meal at a nice restaurant, but rather our choice of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, chips, cookies and beverage at the Atlantic Bakery Co, which is a small, attractive, yes, bakery, that serves sandwiches. However, my turkey with cheese and sun-dried tomatoes on sesame-seeded bread was excellent, as were the kettle-cooked sea-salted potato chips and (especially) the pistachio/apricot/oat cookie. Service is order-at-the-counter, seating is a matter of grab one when you can, but fortunately turn-over was steady, so that by the time we had gotten through the line to present our vouchers, and gone to the various spots in the room to collect our choices (refrigerated case for the sandwiches, nearby table to pluck a packet of chips from a basket, another table to siphon off coffee or tea (i.e., hot water for same) from industrial-sized thermoses, pastry case for cookies) needed seats had usually appeared. I found myself sitting at a small table with a young woman from Maine, married to a very tall, lean young man from the British midlands. They'd met in Wales, where they were both attending university. The three of us were always at the far edge of the group photos Barbara, the organizer, kept insisting on; we would all have preferred not to be in them at all. (Alisha explained her and Mathew's reason: they weren't really Simmons alumni, but simply friends of Barbara's. My reason is I hate having my picture taken.)

We were to be treated to a guided tour of the Farnsworth, just across Main Street from the ABC, at 2 p.m. That was half an hour away, so I opened my umbrella once more and walked a short dis-tance down Main to a lovely, spacious, well-lighted art gallery, the Dowling Walsh, one of twenty-three galleries in this small town. What initially pulled me in was a wonderful ship's model in the window, that I immediately wished I could buy for my sea-loving friend Ernest. (I rarely visit an art gallery that I don't see something I wish I could purchase for a friend, or for myself. If I were wealthy, I would spend a lot of money on works of art.) Once inside I found myself impressed by the paintings of Colin Page, that exhibit a beautiful use of sunlight. I am very enamoured of light in paintings, which is why paintings that do not suggest light, but merely color (I think of Gauguin and Matisse, for example) do nothing for me.

One of Page's paintings, called Blueberry Harvester, was basically of an old farm truck, with a long flatbed attached, pulled up in a farm yard. A very mundane subject, but the scene was permeated with the light of a beautiful sunny day. Proof that a good artist can make a beautiful painting from any subject.

In an adjoining room I was much taken with a picture entitled After Grass, by Richard Vickerson: a long, low dull brown building with a red roof; in front of it, great rolls of golden hay in a field of dull gold, above, a pale, pale blue-to-white sky. Wonderful lines to the house. Almost a Hopper-like simplicity and sense of isolation to the picture. Very Maine-like, I thought, although as a matter of fact Vickerson is Canadian, from nearby Prince Edward Island, where I imagine things look a lot like they do in the northern part of Maine.

Most of the paintings in this room were landscapes by Thomas Paquette. I found some of them to be lovely and interesting, but all rather disturbing, because of the quality of the paint, which some-times looked flat, dull, unable to reflect light. When I reached the table where a copy of the catalog lay, I learned that these were gouaches; consulting an art glossary once I got home, I found that gouach is a type of watercolor paint mixed with a white pigment called body color, which renders the paint opaque. That was the dullness, the flatness I was seeing: opacity. That effect often distracted me from the scene itself; I was too aware of the paint. Nonetheless, there were one or two of his small scenes of the coun-tryside of southern France, where the serenity of the sunsoaked landscape offset the flat smears of color on the mountainside, that I could see myself hanging in my living room, had I the $2,800 to purchase them.

Works by all of these artists can be seen on Dowling Walsh's web site (www.dowlingwalsh.com), an example of what a gift the Internet can be.