Over the years, Fred Thompson has written a number of books on Maine and New England. My copy of “Reflections of Portland Maine” is well-thumbed. He has also written about lightships and his own Rines family, whose members have been leaders and philanthropists in Portland over nearly a century and a half. He himself is the former chairman of the Maine Broadcasting System.
An earlier example of his family’s trailblazing, Thompson’s grandmother, Adeline Bond Rines, was Cumberland County’s first female attorney. The Bond family had a close friend named Mary Neal Richardson, and in the early decades of the 20th century, she was a much sought-after portrait painter. Richardson painted several members of the Bond family, including Adeline. One can guess that it was this portrait that whetted Thompson’s interest in the artist. When he found out how little was known about her, he decided to see what he could do to change the situation. The result: “Mary Neal Richardson, (Maine Artist 1859-1937): A Universalist Esthetic & Cosmic Interpreter.”
Mary Neal Richardson was born in Mt. Vernon, Maine. Her father was a man-of-all-trades, but his calling was as a violin maker. Her mother was a school teacher in Canton, where the family moved soon after Mary’s birth. The “eclectic talents” of her parents, writes Thompson, “helped her transition easily from the practical to the aesthetic.” Canton being a resort town —”Gateway to the Western Mountains” — Mary’s early artistic efforts attracted the attention of visitors from Boston who encouraged her to develop her talent, which she did at the School of Fine Arts in that city.
For much of her life, Richardson spent most of the year in Boston where she had a studio in the Fenway Studios, the first purpose-built complex for artists in the United States. Here she soon racked up an impressive list of portrait subjects, including Massachusetts leaders such as Leverett Saltonstall, II and Governor John D. Long. During the summer she taught at an art school, Pinewood, back in Canton.
Thompson had to dig to find the material for his book, and it was a labor of love. By necessity, his account of Richardson’s life is rather broad, but it is enlivened by anecdotes gleaned from old newspapers. For example, one of her subjects as a little girl told her story years later to the Courier-Gazette. The artist had seen her on a Boston streetcar and asked her mother permission to paint her portrait. She recalled making “a great fuss,” which was partially assuaged by the artist’s home-made cookies.
With their range of human expression, Richardson’s portraits are above the ordinary, and Thompson points out some of the elements that make them cast their spell. On one, the removal of a feather boa hat “revealed, not a haughty Bostonian matriarch, but a vulnerable, fragile woman.” The artist had at first painted the lady with the boa, but then, presumably because of changing fashions (possibly led by the Audubon Society’s campaign against using feathers in millinery) painted it out. Richardson thought one of the techniques that set “modern” paintings apart from the masters of the Renaissance was “light vibration,” which the author illustrates in another portrait by drawing attention to “the translucent nature of the sitter’s pink dress.”
Richardson had long been a member of one of Boston’s Universalist Churches. As she grew older, this and the widespread fascination with spiritualism and theosophy that was sweeping the country led her onto a new, spiritual path as a way to combat the depressing state of the world. She painted a huge picture of Aquarius, the water deliverer in the Zodiac, with dazzling colors, “full of symbolism, astrological references and messages on the occult.”
Starting in 1930, she took this pictorial assertion of her beliefs and travelled across the country with it, giving lectures about its meaning, the coming of the Age of Aquarius. She attracted thousands, especially in California. Among them was Bhai Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, one of the early agitators for Indian independence from Britain, whose Eastern philosophy found a natural corollary in Richardson’s humanism. They became fast friends for the rest of her life.
Fred Thompson has made a valiant effort to resurrect the work of an interesting but unremembered Maine artist. His book includes a great mix of photographs, exhibition catalogs and letters, as well as a fine representation of the artist’s work over the years.
Unfortunately, as a checklist makes clear, the whereabouts of all too many of the nearly 200 pictures she painted — including the mighty “Aquarius”— is unknown. Apart from its immediate merit as a book, let us hope that Thompson’s efforts will arouse more interest in Mary Neal Richardson, and that that interest will lead to the discovery of more of her “lost” works.
Thomas Urquhart is the author of “Up for Grabs! Timber Pirates, Lumber Barons and the Battles Over Maine’s Public Lands.”
