“Portsmouth Doorway” by Abbott Fuller Graves is one of the paintings on exhibit in the Fruitlands Art Gallery. (Courtesy photo)

"We'll start here, with this large nature scene by Ernest Lee Major. He's the intellectual father of many paintings in this room. Major told his students they must paint with a fresh eye: 'Go outside, close your eyes, open them, and paint.' Now, over here, this is by the same artist. But it's a still life. Would you have guessed? He's already looking ahead to the abstract movement. Here, not lemons, but the illusion of lemons." The group follows this enthusiastic, knowledgeable man, absorbing his every word as he moves from one wall of the Fruitlands Art Gallery to another.

This is Sam Robbins, who with his wife Sheila is guest curator of the new exhibit at Fruitlands and host of a walkthrough of the exhibit on a recent Sunday afternoon. New England Impressionists Rediscovered features artists active from the second half of the 19th century and offers an important look at the history of American art. Sam and Sheila Robbins are the perfect guides to help viewers really see each painting and learn the story behind it. As one member of the group said, "He makes the painters real."

One of the better-known artists in the exhibit is Elizabeth Thayer Huntington, a student of Major, whose work is reminiscent of Monet or, closer to home, Benson. Two of her paintings feature profiles of seated women, light hitting the drapes of their long skirts and the masses of flowers behind them. Another painting shows a group of young women gathering poppies. Their long white dresses and dark hair are caught in the wind, and the figures bend in different directions. The paintings are romantic and invite the viewer into the scene. When Sam tells us that the artist was stricken with polio at the age of 29 but insisted on continuing to paint, guiding her paralyzed right arm with her left, we see the work in a new way.

Across the room is a huge canvas by John Enneking. A seated woman seems to hold a lapful of light. The rest of the canvas is a greenish background from which the figure and other shapes seem to emerge as one watches. This is "Portrait of Grace" and the woman is the daughter of the artist, seated on the banks of the Charles River. Sam's information that she was pregnant at the time of the painting suggests that the artist is using light to express very personal feelings.

Sam gets up close to a painting and says he is giving it the impressionism test. "Hmmm," he jokes, "not very good." He goes on to say that what all impressionist artists have in common is that the viewer is asked to 'finish' the painting with his own eyes and mind. "Other 19th painters say, 'Hey, look what I saw.' The impressionist painter says, 'I invite you to finish the painting.' The impressionist dissolves detail to allow the viewer to fill it in with his mind's eye. In so doing, he allows the perception of light and atmosphere to play a more important role in the meaning of a painting." These ideas seem applicable to many of the smaller paintings as well as to "Grace." Both "Opalescent Fog, Gloucester, Mass." by George Noyes and Carl Nordstrom's "Gloucester Harbor" invite the viewer to "finish" the painting. The thickness of the paint in the former, and the lively sense of color in the latter give vitality to the works. In Harold Dunbar's soft, serene painting of Mt. Monadnock the blurry quality asks the viewer's eye to organize what it sees.

“The New Hat” by Elizabeth H.T. Huntington (Courtesy photo)

Abbott Fuller Graves was a friend of Childe Hassam who stayed in Boston while Hassam went to New York and on to fame. Of his "Portsmouth Doorway" Sam says, "It's not a painting of a house; it's a painting of light." He goes on to share how his mind's eye "finishes" the painting; "Any minute now the door is going to open. A lady in white is going to come out into the sunshine …" The group nods in agreement.

On a corner wall hang four relatively small paintings by Mabel Williams. Sam tells us that in the 1920s she was an artist facing a common dilemma: how to paint and also survive. She found the answer in her medium—pastels on hardware-store sandpaper. She would drive around Jackson, N.H., in her Tin Lizzie, painting gardens and other landscapes. In the evening she would lay out her paintings on the porch floor of the town's inn and sell them for five, 10, or 15 dollars. The paintings are now even more charming to the viewer.

Sam stops the flow of the group to ask a rhetorical question: What is a masterpiece? His answer is that a work is a masterpiece if you never get tired of looking at it and if you can't describe or explain it. The group seems to affirm that by these criteria, many of the paintings in the exhibit are true masterpieces.

Moving to a canvas called "Franconia Brook," Sam calls attention to the way the artist has caught the leaves blowing in the brook. One can feel the movement. Daniel Santry spent everything he had to go to France to study with Pissaro, only to have the master tell him, "I don't give lessons." He did allow Santry to spend the summer in his barn and to paint near him, where he would offer a comment now and then. That summer evolved to seven. Returning to Boston, Santry opened a gallery near Jordan Marsh but made no sales. He answered an ad for an artist-in-residence in New Hampshire, where he sold his paintings to tourists.

"Wedding Bouquet" is a small painting of a bouquet of lilacs where one can almost smell the fragrance of the many shades of purple, lavender, and mauve. The sweet painting can speak for itself, but it gains an even more powerful voice when Sam tells us that this is the painter's wife's bouquet, painted on their wedding day. The story was told by Clifford Alexander's daughter who said that after the ceremony at Boston City Hall her father said he had to go back to his studio instead of leaving directly for the honeymoon. He had to capture the bouquet while it was fresh. The painting hung by her mother's bedside throughout her life.

"Anyone ever heard of Sidney Chase?" asks Sam. To silence he answers, "I hadn't either." The painter was a friend of George Bellows who went on to become widely acclaimed. Chase has captured a fisherman going out to work first thing in the morning. Sam jokes that some of the artists in the exhibit are "more rediscovered than others" as he moves to a canvas by J. Frank Currier, whom Sam calls the most famous American painter that people don't know.

After several more paintings, Sam says, "I guess that's everything. Oh, wait, over there." And he hurries across the room to Oliver Chaffee's "Provincetown Garden," a very different, almost "modern" painting. Sam calls attention to the influence of Matisse in the colors of the flowers.

Sam Robbins looks around the room as though he will never get enough of this exhibit, which he calls "the best impressionist show ever made of New England artists." He gives a sigh of awe: "After we're gone, these paintings will still be here. Art is long; life is short."

The exhibit runs through Nov. 15; Sam will give a walkthrough in July, August, September, and October.