Trinity Star Arts Council presents: A Winter Wonderland – Train Display. This exhibit will be open daily from December 21-30, 2020 from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. at the Williford Foundation Building at 115 S. Mount Street in Fairfield, Texas.
The exhibit will be closed Dec. 24, 25 and 31.
Antique Model Trains
This holiday exhibit is as nostalgic and evocative in historic and inspired ways as the Williford Foundation that hosts it.
Since earliest decades of the 20th Century when Joshua Lionel Cowen’s innovative electric model railroads were first created and sold in the U.S., energetic miniature trains have been essential to American Christmas festivity.
Joshua Lionel Cowen (originally Cohen) was born the eighth of nine children in New York City on August 25, 1877, to Eastern European immigrant parents. As a child, he was always curious about how mechanical things worked. Thus, when he was a young teenager, his parents enrolled him in the Peter Cooper Institute High School – named after the inventor of the steam locomotive – where Cowen got a practical education in the mechanical arts and sciences.
In 1899, at only 22 years of age, Cowen filed his first federal patent for a battery-powered device that ignited a photographic flash. He named it the “Flash Lamp.” The device so impressed U.S. Navy officials that they gave Cowen a $12,000 contract to produce 24,000 detonators for underwater mines. With that money, Cowen and a partner set up a production facility in a Manhattan loft in 1900 and incorporated as the Lionel Manufacturing Company for the purpose of, “the manufacture of electrical, mechanical and industrial appliances…and toys.”
Santa Claus and a shimmering tree almost inevitable showcased a tirelessly circling toy train. Indeed, considering how a passion for mobility remains a basic instinct amongst other citizens, the electric train easily qualifies as an icon of American faith. In 1999, Lionel Trains were included in the top ten 20th Century toys!
Antique Model O Trains on display at the Williford Foundation are owned and operated by Frank Dent.
‘A Winter Wonderland’ Exhibit
Artwork includes 19th century paintings by:
–Thomas Cole: America’s leading landscape painter during the first half of the nineteenth century. His ambition was to create a “higher style of landscape” that could express moral or religious meanings. Cole’s landscapes were notable for their increase accuracy in the depiction of atmosphere and light.
–Walter Gay: This American artist spent much of his career in Paris, first studying under Léon Bonnat along with John Singer Sargent, and later teaching his own pupils. In fact, so many young American artists studied under Gay in Paris that the New York Times dubbed him the “Dean of American Artists in Paris.” Gay virtually created a new genre when he began focusing on depictions of luxurious interiors, which included porcelain, furnishings, gilt mirrors and paintings.
–Walter McEwen: One of the most highly decorated American artists of the late 19th century, best known for his charming depictions of rural Dutch life.
–Charles Platt: A prominent artist, landscape gardener, landscape designer, and architect of the “American Renaissance” movement. Platt designed a grand country estate for Edith Rockefeller McCormick at “Villa Turicum” in Lake Forest, Illinois, and a townhouse for Sara Delano Roosevelt on East 65th Street in New York, which now serves as a historic landmark. Among his children were William and Geoffrey, who followed in his footsteps to practice architecture in New York City. His great-grandson is actor Oliver Platt.
–Stephen Seymour Thomas: Born in 1868 in San Augustine, Texas to parent who built the first two-story house in the State, Thomas showed artistic talent at an early age and was constantly drawing and painting. During his art career, Thomas lived in Paris and New York, spending most of his time in painting the portraits for which he would become famous. He was commissioned for portrait of Sam Houston for the Texas building at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Thomas also painted several portraits of President Woodrow Wilson, one of which hangs in the White House.
–Dora Wheeler: The first artwork published under her own name was a Christmas card design that won first prize in the Prang competition in 1881. During this time, Wheeler embarked on a series of portraits of the leading literary lights of her time, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman. Her portrait of a close family friend, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, now hangs in the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. Wheeler enjoyed success as a book and magazine illustrator, and was the primary designer for textiles for her mother’s enterprise Associated Artists which produced tapestry designs used in the parlor of the Vanderbilt Mansion. One of her first major public projects was a mural painted on canvas and mounted on the ceiling of the Library of the Woman’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
–Eli Vedder: An American symbolist painter, book illustrator, and poet, born in New York City. He is best known for his fifty-five illustrations for Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam published by Houghton Mifflin. Tiffany commissioned Vedder to design glassware, mosaics, and statuettes for the company. He also decoare the hallway of the Reading Room of the Washington Library of Congress, and his mural paintings can still be seen there.
The Williford Foundation Collection
The Williford Foundation Building is located at 115 S. Mount Street in downtown Fairfield, Texas.
The American art collection formed by Fairfield native Graham Williford (1926-2006), now held by The Jean and Graham Devoe Williford Charitable Trust, consists of works created by American artists who were active roughly between the Civil War and the end of World War I – in Europe, the United States, and in quite a few instances, on both sides of the Atlantic.
This timeframe was the crux of Graham’s collecting focus, for he deeply admired the efforts of academically-trained Americans working before the shift to abstraction (and away from classical art education) which occurred around the time of the Armory Show in 1913.
Born and raised in Fairfield, Graham Williford was a maverick not just because he hailed from Texas, but because he appreciated and collected American art as early as the 1950’s, when it was still a mere blip on most art collector’s radar. Graham had a particular fondness both for expatriate painters, and also for work produced by Americans during the period of their early training in Europe.
Stop by today, and enjoy the display.
