I lingered in Scarsdale because I was visiting a childhood friend and her husband and we enjoyed a large Sunday breakfast–and some Massachusetts trip planning –before I headed out toward the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, a pleasant drive from suburban New York City. I expected the museum to be much smaller and quieter than it is. I was surprised and gratified to see many people there. Rockwell is typically seen as an illustrator and not an artist, but the museum highlights his craft, his voice as demonstrated in his work, and his evolution as an artist over time. The wall of the Saturday Evening Post covers was particularly interesting, as it traces US history through five decades; other parts of the museum trace his edgier work at Look magazine. His studio was interesting, but I did not linger with the crowd as I nursed a cold and the etiquette that had evolved during Covid spurred me to leave the group and head outside, where I wandered around the grounds before heading to another museum in the Berkshires.
My next stop was at the Edith Wharton Museum, which is located at The Mount, her summer home in the Berkshires. I must admit that I have never read Wharton; I’ve encountered her work through film adaptations. It’s a real gap in my education. During the Gilded Age, the Berkshires became a haven for wealthy northeasterners, so houses from the age appear throughout the landscape.
Wharton’s home there details her life with her husband, which began with considerable affluence that decreased as he declined mentally. She had been publishing since her youth, and as he declined, her writing became important financially. When they divorced just before World War I, they had to sell the property. It traded hands a few times, hosting a school for some time and then a theater company, before it was bought out by a trust and turned into a museum. I arrived with just time to visit, then I wandered the grounds looking at sculptures on the grounds in the lingering evening.
It was a quiet Sunday. I could not find any casual place to eat in Lenox, so I went back to Stockbridge andhad a sundae from the general store while I looked at my entertainment and lodging options online. At this point, I had passed signs for a variety of theater companies and poked in at Tanglewood. I had checked the performances earlier in the summer, and the options that particular night were expensive and not all that compelling. I wish I had looked at later in the week, as there was a Yo Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax concert of Beethoven, but I had already made hotel reservations in Boston and there was no time to return to western Massachusetts. Local companies were putting on the Wizard of Oz and Christopher Lloyd doing King Lear, but I could not get tickets for that night. It compels me to come back just for the theater some other summer now that I have a better sense of what’s there.
I found a motel in Williamstown for the night.