A.T. Hibbard had an odd sense of direction. Every winter, while those with the inclination and money traveled south to avoid the coming blizzards, the artist found himself inexorably drawn to Vermont. What scared others away was precisely what drew him there: all that snow.
He came for the first time in 1915 on the advice of a fellow artist. He liked what he saw so much that he came back the next year. Soon the state became part of his life, as he returned every winter for more than half a century. In the process, he became part of Vermont, capturing some of the most compelling and beautiful visions of the state ever rendered on canvas.
Hibbard’s first name was Aldroandus, Aldro for short. His mother, something of an intellectual, had named him after a 16th-century Italian naturalist. Understandably, his friends called him “Al” or “Hibb.”
Hibbard was born in 1886 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and grew up in the Dorchester section of Boston. Family lore had it that his artistic gifts were apparent at the age of 4. By 12, he was a skilled draftsman.
After graduating Dorchester High School — along with classmate Rose Fitzgerald, future mother of President John F. Kennedy — Hibbard attended a Boston-area art school, finishing the four-year program in three. He was such a prodigy one of his teachers warned him, “Don’t let anybody see how easy it comes.” He told Hibbard to push himself instead of just coasting on his talent. The advice stuck.
Hibbard moved on to the Boston Museum School of Art, where he studied with two of the city’s top artists, Frank Benson and Edmund Tarbell. Upon graduating, he won a coveted scholarship to travel Europe for a year and paint.
When he returned, Hibbard set up a studio in Boston, but wanted to paint farther afield.
Though he had excelled at portraiture, Hibbard was happier doing landscapes. “I have always found it exciting to work outdoors where things are happening,” he said. “Inside, you lose the challenge, the stimulation.”
He asked artist William Kaula, who had a studio in the same building, whether he knew anything about Vermont. Coincidentally, Kaula had just returned from a painting trip to Newfane and told Hibbard that he would like it.
Hibbard traveled to Brattleboro. Touring the area and poring over maps, he decided to visit the town of Jamaica. It was just what he wanted. He later said he had reached Vermont just in time, while it was still rough-edged and rustic.
Jamaica and nearby towns like Londonderry, Newfane, Rawsonville and Bondville were full of untamed areas with rugged mountains and snaking rivers. These parts would become the subject of many of his paintings.
“You must get to know a place before you can paint it,” Hibbard said. “Otherwise you just do a flash picture that misses the meaning and potential of your subject.”
He lived by that credo, immersing himself in the landscape and culture of the area. His biographer, John Cooley, explained in his “Artist in Two Worlds” that for Hibbard, “painting required rising before dawn, drinking a quart of black coffee, eating a durable breakfast, encasing himself in his arctic uniform, and setting forth into the weather.”
Sometimes he would hike as many as 10 miles to reach a spot he had scouted out. Once at a site, he set to work, laying in paint as fast as he could before the sun rose too high and bleached out the scene’s color and shortened its shadows.
“Paint fast,” he advised students. “Times is always against you. Use up your nervous energy. A morning’s painting should wear you out.”
When he could, he would rendezvous with the loggers around dawn and hitch a ride into the woods on their ox- or horse-drawn sleds. Sometimes he would paint some distant vista. Other times, he would turn his canvas and paint the loggers at work. When the weather proved too cold to paint in, he would stow his brushes and help the loggers load their sleds.
Those must have been cold days indeed. His winter painting attire include woolen long johns, two or three layers of outer clothing, felt-lined boots, a wool hat with earflaps, and snowshoes. If he found the snow too soft at his desired location, he would dig a pit to stand in and lodge his easel in the snow at its edge. One time, the wind blew over his easel, scattering his supplies. He found some of his paints the next spring, still usable.
When he wasn’t painting, Hibbard often organized parties with neighbors and any visiting painter friends. The parties sometimes included card games and talent shows, which let Hibbard display his considerable skills as a magician.
When he married, he brought his wife, a fellow painter named Winifred Jackman, to Vermont. Over the years, the couple raised two children as part-time Vermonters.
Every spring, the Hibbards would leave Vermont. Summers here were too green for him. They lacked, he said, the drama of the state’s winters. Hibbard would go to Rockport, Massachusetts, located 30 miles northeast of Boston, where he became famed for his harbor scenes.
As an artist, he was equally comfortable in both worlds–the summer shore and the winter mountains. Fittingly, the Smithsonian Museum has two Hibbards in its collection — one of the town of Rockport and its harbor, the other of Vermonters cutting ice from a pond.
While in Rockport, Hibbard ran an art school and founded the Rockport Art Association, which still promotes art in the area through classes, auctions, publications and a museum. Hibbard gained a national reputation. He was even awarded the title of National Academician by his peers at the National Academy of Design. At any given time, there are only about a dozen National Academicians. The honor, a lifetime title, gave Hibbard the right to sign his paintings with the suffix “N.A.,” but he never felt comfortable doing so.
Though he split his time between two states, many more of his canvases are of Vermont, perhaps because fewer responsibilities competed for his time. From his home base in Windham County, Hibbard made occasional forays around the state, heading off to capture scenes in places like Sharon or Arlington and into the shadow of Camels Hump and Mount Mansfield.
On one painting trip, Hibbard stayed with fellow artists Emile Gruppe, Chauncey Ryder, John Carlson, Charles Curtis Allen and Paul Strisik at an inn near Mount Mansfield. After a night of socializing, all the artists, except Gruppe, went to bed, planning to get an early start at painting the next day. Gruppe stayed downstairs, playing the inn’s piano.
The music woke Hibbard, who stormed downstairs and yelled at Gruppe for the disturbance. Fumbling for words, Gruppe shot back: “You paint too purple!” Hibbard’s palette had apparently long bothered Gruppe.
Hibbard did indeed use purple, but he would have said he used it judiciously, along with pink, yellow, blue and green, to capture the shadows and reflections off snow. As a winter artist, he understood that snow has a way of reflecting other colors and that it is never pure white.
Hibbard’s paintings endure because they offer glimpses of how one man, with a keen, well-trained eye, saw Vermont. In some cases, they show views of the state that have hardly changed. In others, they depict faded traditions, such as community ice harvests, sawmills in the midst of the woods and maple sugar makers using oxen to draw their sleds.
“You know,” he once explained, “I made an early decision: Always paint the unusual, and paint it when you see it. Never put off a subject. When you return, it may not be there.”
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