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| Historical Hodgepodge:Dispatches from the Saco Museum |
| Bradbury Acquisitions |
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William Henry and Isabel L. Owen circa 1860 |
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We are excited to announce that the museum has been able to acquire two paintings by local artist Gibeon Elden Bradbury (1833-1904). “The Owen Children in a Landscape” (circa 1857) and “William Henry and Isabel L. Owen” (circa 1860) have been on loan to the museum since 1986. They were acquired from siblings Catherine Owen Major, Constance Owen, and Lauren Owen, who are direct descendants of the children depicted in the paintings.
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Gibeon Bradbury trained as an ornamental painter of wagons, sleighs, and carriages—a trade he practiced throughout his life in order to help make ends meet for his family. But his real love was painting views of the landscape along the Saco River near his hometown of Buxton. He loved to wander along the banks of the river where he filled his sketchbooks with landscape drawings and detailed animal and botanical studies. Over the years, he produced countless local landscape and floral paintings. The Saco Museum is fortunate to have a more than 70 paintings and drawings by Bradbury in the collection. They can be viewed online or from our website by choosing Saco Museum Catalog from the Museum tab.
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The two paintings of the Owen children are notable among Bradbury’s works for a few reasons. The sitters of many of the portraits that Bradbury completed are now unknown, whereas the children in these portraits have concrete identities. Most of Bradbury’s paintings are fairly small in scale, but those of the Owen children are quite large.
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|  | The Owen Children in a Landscape
circa 1857 |
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We also know that Bradbury won awards at the York County Agricultural Fair for both of these portraits. In 1857, he was awarded $2.00 for the painting of the Owen children in the landscape. A few years later, in 1862, the portrait of William and Isabel was named Best Oil Painting for which he received $3.
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And finally, the portrait of the children in the landscape was based on a daguerreotype, rather than a sketch. Photography was still new in the 1850s and few painters used photographs as sources for their work. Photography was still new in the 1850s and few painters
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used photographs as sources for their work. The photograph shows three children in a small carriage, while the painting depicts four. The Owens had four children, two boys and two girls. Their daughter Lucy died at the age of eight in 1855, so the photograph must have been taken after that. Bradbury probably included her in the painting at her parents’ request.
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| A New Discovery | |
 | While researching 19th century clothing items for inclusion in one of our online exhibits, we made an unexpected discovery—one of the donors to our collection was rather famous. |
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While searching for information on the the original owner of an early 19th century calash bonnet, we became so distracted trying to connect that individual with the family of the donor that we paid no attention to the donor's name: E.B. White. That’s right—Elwyn Brooks White—better known as E.B., the author of “Charlotte’s Web”! According to notes taken when the item was donated, the calash bonnet probably belonged to Abigail Fellows Cunningham Shepley of Saco. As it turns out, White’s wife, Katherine was Abigail’s great granddaughter. E.B. donated ten clothing items to the museum’s collection a few years before he passed away, probably all of them from Katherine’s family.
Both E.B. and his wife Katherine were writers with long associations with the New Yorker magazine. Their primary residence was in New York, but in 1933 they bought a home in Brooklin, Maine, which they quickly converted to year-round habitation. It was that home that served as the inspiration for Charlotte’s Web. Upon retiring, the couple moved to their house in Maine permanently. Katherine died in 1977 and E.B. in 1985; they are both buried in the Brooklin Cemetery.
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| Saco Museum Online |
If you haven’t checked out the online exhibits available through our new website, you really should. If you choose Saco Museum Collection from the Museum tab on our webpage, you will be directed to the online exhibitions available for viewing. We currently have 19 online exhibits, four of which are brand-new: Craft and Comfort (based on our 2019 furniture exhibit), The Fabrics of Their Lives (items from our current exhibit), Saco-Lowell Shops (photographs taken by Lawrence Dolby in the early and mid-20th century), and Clothing and Accessories.
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Find Out More
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