Art Review: Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, N.Y.

A few weeks ago, I began a series of stories on art museums and artists in New York but outside the city and its suburbs. There’s good art to be found all over the state, even in tiny, little-known places like Canajoharie, on the old Erie Canal, an hour west of Albany. The Arkell Museum of Art, also known as the Canajoharie Library and Arkell Museum, has a 350-object gem-of-a-collection of American paintings almost entirely assembled for the locals by the owner of Beech-Nut, famous mostly for baby food and chewing gum but a pioneer in vacuum-packed food of all kinds.

The art was acquired from the 1920s to the ’40s by Bartlett Arkell (1862–1946), Beech-Nut’s president, to fill, along with the library, a cultural center he built across the road from his factory. Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Sloan, Maurice Prendergast, Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, and other heavy hitters are there in splendor. It’s a tiny place and indeed both an art gallery and the local public library. It’s a temple to one small town’s can-do spirit and civic pride, to noblesse oblige, to idiosyncrasy, to learning, and especially to Homer, represented by seven oil paintings and 14 watercolors.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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A few weeks ago, I began a series of stories on art museums and artists in New York but outside the city and its suburbs. There’s good art to be found all over the state, even in tiny, little-known places like Canajoharie, on the old Erie Canal, an hour west of Albany. The Arkell Museum of Art, also known as the Canajoharie Library and Arkell Museum, has a 350-object gem-of-a-collection of American paintings almost entirely assembled for the locals by the owner of Beech-Nut, famous mostly for baby food and chewing gum but a pioneer in vacuum-packed food of all kinds.

The art was acquired from the 1920s to the ’40s by Bartlett Arkell (1862–1946), Beech-Nut’s president, to fill, along with the library, a cultural center he built across the road from his factory. Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Sloan, Maurice Prendergast, Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, and other heavy hitters are there in splendor. It’s a tiny place and indeed both an art gallery and the local public library. It’s a temple to one small town’s can-do spirit and civic pride, to noblesse oblige, to idiosyncrasy, to learning, and especially to Homer, represented by seven oil paintings and 14 watercolors.