Book Notes: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Whittemore Collection and the French Impressionists

By Ann Y. Smith, Garnett Hill Publishing Company and the Mattatuck Historical Society, 2009 (114 pages, 62 illustrations), $40.00.

Unfortunately, the English language doesn’t have an everyday term to cover the combined results of architecture, planning, and landscape architecture. These disciplines often work together in ways that the public, and their respective professional groups, don’t always recognize as three aspects of a single larger activity. One might call it ‘Placemaking,’ because what lies at the heart of each discipline is the idea of shaping places for human activity and enjoyment—what one might call turning places into Places.

            In Connecticut, a remarkable bit of Placemaking occurred in Naugatuck, Waterbury, and Middlebury at the turn of the 20^th century, when J. H. Whittemore, who had made a fortune in iron manufacturing, and his son and successor, Harris Whittemore, erected buildings, created designed landscapes, and preserved natural land—all with architects and landscape architects of national repute. At the same time, the Whittemores were early and important collectors of Impressionist art, at a time when most of their peers still concentrated on Old Masters.

            Architectural historians are likely to know something of the Whittmores’ building activities, and art historians may know some of their art acquisitions, but the two stories have not been put together until now, with the publication by the Mattatuck Historical Society of Hidden in Plain Sight: The Whittemore Collection and the French Impressionists, by Ann Y. Smith, a museum consultant and former director of the Mattatuck.   

            Hidden in Plain Sight is divided into three chapters: the first sketches the history of the Whittemore family in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The second chapter outlines the Whittemores’ architectural projects in Naugatuck, Middlebury, and Waterbury, including buildings by McKim, Mead and White, Henry Bacon, and Theodate Pope, landscape designs by Charles Eliot and Warren Manning, and the preservation of large tracts of natural land that eventually became part of the state park system. The final chapter recounts the development of the Whittemores’ art collection, with works by such figures as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, and Edgar Degas.

            It seems clear that a common aesthetic sense underlies both the Whittemores’ appreciation for Impressionist art—with its love of landscapes—and their building activities. What makes the Whittemores’ achievement remarkable is that they clearly thought in terms that extended beyond individual buildings or gardens: in Naugatuck they transformed an entire town with public buildings and spaces; in Middlebury they created a vast estate that was both ornamental and productive; and between the two they reshaped the entire countryside with preserved natural land and landscaped roads (see CPN, May/June 2003). In short, their focus was on Placemaking.

            Although the Whittemores’ art collection is now scattered among various public and private holders, many of their creations survive (although it would have been helpful if Smith had made it clearer what remains and what has been demolished). Together they constitute one of Connecticut’s great masterpieces of Placemaking. Hidden in Plain Sight helps us to understand these works by telling how it came to be, by documenting the parts that have been lost, and, most of all, by giving us access to the other half of the story.

Hidden in Plain Sight is available from the Mattatuck Museum, in Waterbury; (203) 753-0381.