Remembering Irises

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

Over dinner with Uncle Lewi we often get talking about art and the other night I remembered a particular experience with a painting.

No one else was in the room and except for the receptionist, no one else was in the building. I sat in a comfortable chair and looked at Irises, painted in 1889 by Vincent van Gogh. How much time slipped by I do not remember.

It was the summer of 1981. I lived in Lakeport, New Hampshire and frequently visited friends in Kennebunkport, Maine. Those were some times, putting around with a gang of rowdies in an old life boat in the middle of the night, giving the U.S. Coast Guard at anchor around the president’s house something to do. There might have been the consumption of rum involved. At any rate, my drive to the coast took me through Westbrook, Maine and there was a little art gallery on the campus of Westbrook College I’d heard about with a gem of a collection.

The Joan Whitney Payson Gallery of Art was in a small but very contemporary building. It was a cube of concrete and stood out among the otherwise staid New England architecture. There were indeed a number of gems in that collection, on loan to the college by Joan’s son John Whitney Payson. But it was the van Gogh, glowing and dancing that stopped me in my tracks and set me in a chair for a while.

Is it the Divine, the eye and the hand of God which speaks to us through such paintings? We have life before and after experiencing them, but what we have during those moments transcends it all… and forever changes who we are and how we see. I would go back and sit down and look at Irises two or three more times.

Mr. Payson sold the painting in the fall of 1987 at auction for $53.9 million. Part of the proceeds made for generous gifts to a number of arts organizations. The painting now belongs to The Getty Museum. The painting no doubt benefits many more people in its new home, but it saddens me a bit this happened. There is no replacing the richness of the experience of wandering into a little gallery well off the beaten path and sit down and have all to yourself in the quiet for as long as you want, van Gogh’s Irises.

Gordon Bunker

Image courtesy of The Getty Museum.