Reynolda House Leads the Way, in Charm and Welcome

Great American work from living and dead artists, luscious gardens, and a commitment to serve the public, even amid COVID.

R eynolda House is one of the sweetest, loveliest museums in the country. I’ve been there many times because it has a superb collection of American paintings, but I hadn’t visited in probably ten years. It’s part of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., so it’s a university art museum but it’s a grand house, the home of the Reynolds tobacco barons. It wasn’t part of the school until recently, so its collection is eccentric and not curriculum-driven. It’s a unique place. I visited during my road trip through North Carolina.

Frederic Church, Eakins, Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Georgia O’Keeffe, and many others are in the Reynolda House collection, in a comfortable, idiosyncratic home setting, and at 3 p.m. there’s a short recital via the pipe organ in the grand reception room.

Reynolda House started as the 64-room home of R. J. Reynolds, founder of the tobacco company, and his wife, Katharine, built for them in 1917 in the country-estate style associated with the Main Line in Philadelphia and the Gold Coast of Long Island. The house has presence and is a big part of the museum’s personality. It’s got a big, rambling bungalow look, with a massive stone foundation, extended dormers, and deep porches giving it a close-to-the-earth feel consistent with its place as the jewel of a thousand-acre property. The approach puts the visitor in a relaxed, informal mood. It’s not like Biltmore, which is more of a grand, bombastic English country home, but Reynolda was built as a self-sufficient estate with a supporting village. That’s part of its charm.

Reynolds died soon after the house was finished, but his wife lived there until her death as did one of their children until it became an art museum in 1967.

It’s an indoor/outdoor place with a lovely, big garden, a lake, and rolling lawns. It’s set on the edge of the Georgian Revival campus of Wake Forest University. Years ago, I associated its paintings collection with landscapes, and that made sense. The Reynolds money came from farming, and Winston-Salem itself is a pretty small city in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. There are views of the garden and lawn from most windows in the museum.

There’s plenty of great art, but the two icons are Church’s The Andes of Ecuador, from 1855, and Bierstadt’s Sierra Nevada, from around 1871. They’re big, splashy landscapes and certainly famous. It’s hard not to look at them without awe.

Bierstadt’s work is often on the abyss, sublime but teetering over a pit of schlock, but Sierra Nevada is still in the realm of the sublime. It’s got all the bells and whistles of the best Hudson River School painters, and although the Sierra Nevada is far from the Hudson River, Bierstadt is a painter who adores the American landscape and seascape and invests in them a divine splendor that runs through the genre from Cole to, say, Inness and Homer. It’s got mountains, and they get bigger and bigger as they recede into the misty heavens. It’s got a vast, pristine water feature. It’s got elk, it’s got local trees, and it’s got the classic Western topographical variety, from plain to peaks.

The Andes of Ecuador is a six-footer with the same sense of vastness. Both paintings were motivated by the same goal — celebrating the freshness and sweep of the New World — and both are painted with a miniaturist’s obsession with detail. Home in the Woods is at Reynolda House, too. It’s one of Cole’s last paintings, done the year before he died, and shows a family and their log cabin on the edge of the wilderness. There are lots of other wonderful, surprising landscapes. Grant Wood’s Spring Turning, from 1936, is there. It’s another kind of Eden — the Iowa farm variety — spare, geometric, Art Deco, but as luscious as the Church and the Bierstadt.

The portrait of Asburyh Wright Lee from 1904 is one of my favorite works by Eakins. It’s not beautiful. It’s brutal and one of the toughest portraits I know. Lee (1841–1927) owned a lumber mill in Clearfield in central Pennsylvania. He was a small-town Edwardian grandee and met Eakins through the Philadelphia Arts Club. I’d go to Reynolda just to see this one picture. It was an inspired acquisition.

The portrait is a failure in that Lee returned it to Eakins as “not accepted by me,” with a check for $200, writing a brief note saying his daughter liked it “in a general way.” He added, “I may make a suggestion when I am down soon.” Whether that suggestion involved the “digitus medius manus,” as Cicero would have put it, is unknown.

It’s one thing to eschew flattery in painting a portrait. It’s quite another to vivisect your subject. It’s not that Eakins lost interest in the painting, since it’s done in microscopic detail. It’s a three-quarter-length portrait, not a simple bust, so it’s special. Eakins was trained in the École des Beaux Arts in Paris in the late 1860s. His finish is usually tight and tidy in the French Academic style, but in painting Lee, it’s tense and unyielding.

I remember Tom Wolfe first using the term “social X-ray” in the 1980s. Well, in the Lee portrait, Eakins might have invented radiology. Lee sits erect, corseted in simple black. His face is like cold marble, with full lips, but they’re ever-so-pursed. The deep creases in his face look like scars. Eakins uses his standard, indistinct, fluffy dark background. It’s feathery, and it makes Lee’s severity starker. I’ve seen photographs of Lee. He looks, well, a lot nicer.

There’s a big difference between a cool cat and a cold fish, and Lee shuttles between the two. He’s got big baby-blue eyes, but they’re abstract, not empty but cold. I love his hands. Amid his tightness, his austerity, they’re open, not limp but inviting. He looks like he’s in a trance, imagining he’s met Satan and thinking, “I can handle this guy.”

It’s an impressive portrait and says something else about Eakins. Lee was one of the few portraits that Eakins did of small-town, mercantile royalty. Usually his subjects were Philadelphia doctors, scientists, and professors, his friends and students, and rich Philadelphia sophisticates. For the bohemian Eakins, Lee was his version of a deplorable.

Reynolda House was founded by the members of the Reynolds family who lived there in the 1960s. Barbara Millhouse is the Reynolds with the vision, and she chaired the board for years and built the collection. I’ve never met her, but I admire her. I’ve known many great collectors. Some are sensualists who buy art that appeals to the eye, but they really don’t know much about what they’ve bought. Some are accumulators. They like having lots of stuff, and once in a while the fishing net brings that rare blue lobster.

Millhouse is a collector with a curator’s eye and knowledge. She studied art history at Smith, which is a very good place for an art historian to start. That said, in the 1960s, when she got involved with Reynolda as a collecting museum, she wasn’t a prodigy. She has good judgment about people and got advice from many dealers, among them Stuart Feld, whose own eye for good art is close to perfect.

Over time, Millhouse educated herself and developed a taste that is not wild but is distinct and tuned to the very best. She reminds me of Ruth Stevenson, Amon Carter’s daughter, and Rosa de la Cruz, a smart, passionate collector of contemporary art living in Miami. Both built great collections basically from scratch, using their wealth but also their own good judgment.

Millhouse gave the Grant Wood for the museum as well as a top-notch Stuart Davis painting from 1945 and a mysterious Arthur Dove painting from 1934. In 2014, she gave Reynolda probably the best thing Lee Krasner painted. Birth, from 1956, is big, bold, and emotional. Krasner’s crazy, drunkard husband, Jackson Pollock, died that year in a car crash. It’s a stunning painting about fresh starts and assertiveness.

Reynolda is adding the work of living artists, as it should. I saw a great Thornton Dial assemblage. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the collection on the alert.

Reynolda has a scholarly mission. When I was there, I saw a beautiful show on Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained glass. It’s doing what I think will be a great exhibition this spring on how living artists interpret Cole, Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and other Hudson River School starts. It is a university art museum and publishes well-done catalogues on its shows. Over the past few years, Reynolda House formalized and regularized its relationship to Wake Forest. My sense is that it’s integrated into the curriculum but isn’t slavish about it. It’s still its own thing with its own personality.

I would suggest embracing the “house” part of Reynolda House. Let people sit on the family furniture. It was all sumptuously reupholstered and looks fancy, but it’s mostly department-store reproductions. It’s Elsie de Wolfe–selected, so visitors, among them students, can enjoy the Reynolds family’s good taste in a grand but comfortable setting.

At the Addison Gallery, I put out sofas belonging to one of the museum’s founders. It’s good Art Deco furniture but nothing distinguished and nothing accessioned in the museum collection. Sometimes, on Sunday at 5, I had to wake someone up and tell them it was time to go, but it’s part of the ambience. The Addison is small, and I wanted to promote a casual, even domestic feel.

This isn’t a criticism of Reynolda House. Rather, it’s a statement of my own evolution from suit-and-tie formality to plaid flannel shirts and work boots. I’d add that two of my museums were the art gallery at Yale and the Addison, so I’m accustomed to seeing students studying, kibitzing, or nursing hangovers in the galleries. The Wake Forest students seem civilized.

Reynolda House was among the leaders in the push among North Carolina museums to reopen quickly after the senseless, destructive Chinese coronavirus lockdown. The Asheville Art Museum joined with it in lobbying the state’s governor to open the doors to culture to the public. There are no documented cases of COVID contracted in a museum — none — and museums are well suited to provide as safe an environment as is possible, unless we abolish human contact. The public-health mediocrities and cover-my-ass politicians would rather imprison the public and blame the public for their own impotence and incompetence.

At Reynolda, and at the Asheville museum, it’s obvious that the premium is on welcoming the public. I’d use the word “gracious” to describe both.

The governor, like most politicians, had to be educated. A museum isn’t, for instance, just like a bar or a bowling alley. The directors of these two museums were among the few in the profession who lobbied, and lobbied convincingly, to serve the public. I wish the museum profession overall would show the same chutzpah.