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Artist's Harford connection

'It's much more of a story being told, as opposed to a portrait.'

BY BRYNA ZUMER

Posted 9/03/10

(Enlarge) He also began painting race horses and behind-the-scenes images of racing life, such as horses being turned out, groomed and exercised. "He came up with a very different style of painting, that was not your traditional horse standing in a field," Colwill said. "It was a much more modernist approach to looking at things." (Photo Courtesy of Ellen B. Pons)

Although he came to Darlington to retire and paint behind-the-scenes pictures of the horse-racing world, Vaughn Flannery has not had his art shown in Harford County — until now.

Two of Flannery’s oil paintings are featured in the Baltimore Museum of Art, and his work has been recognized and displayed nationwide.

Now, a new exhibit opening at Bel Air’s Liriodendron on Oct. 3 and running through Dec. 5 is set to focus on the early-19th-century artist as well.

Maryanna Skowronski, gallery coordinator for the historic mansion, said it’s about time Flannery gets more recognition in the county he called home for decades.

“I have wanted to do this show for a very long time,” Skowronski said. “His work has really never been shown in Harford County, and because he has been deceased for such a length of time, most people really don’t know anything about his work.”

Being well-connected in the horse-racing world, Flannery, once director of the Maryland Jockey Club, painted such famous thoroughbreds as the champion Man o’ War. He also ran the Harford Gazette.

Born in 1898 in Kentucky, he originally pursued a career in advertising and worked for the well-known New York firm Young & Rubicam.

Stiles Colwill, a former curator of the Maryland Historical Society who has been spearheading research on Flannery for about a decade and collected his paintings since 1972, said Flannery’s advertising career was very successful.

“I think Flannery, through his design sensibility, doing advertising in the ‘20s, was responsible for quite a few well-known and famous advertising campaigns,” Colwill said.

That work may have helped influence his untraditional approach to painting when he traded his New York lifestyle for a Harford County farm in the 1930s, concentrating on painting instead of advertising.

Flannery moved with his wife to Cockade Farm in Darlington, where he wound up breeding thoroughbreds and raising Angus cattle, Skowronski said.

He also began painting race horses and behind-the-scenes images of racing life, such as horses being turned out, groomed and exercised.

“He came up with a very different style of painting, that was not your traditional horse standing in a field,” Colwill said. “It was a much more modernist approach to looking at things.”

In his work, “it’s not untypical to see an animal cut in half, like a horse walking out of the frame,” he said.

Colwill said Flannery was one of the few equine artists in his era who went on to have national fame.

He was overshadowed, though, Skowronski said, by some other equestrian artists of his day, such as Frank Voss, because less of his work exists and because he was less inclined to paint on commission.

“Frank Voss took commissions left and right,” she said. For Flannery, “it was not his favorite thing to do.”

Colwill said Flannery did a series of commissions for the Whitney family, the namesake of The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and the Vanderbilt family.

“When he would take [commissions], he would go and paint what he liked. He might go to your farm but he wouldn’t paint what you wanted,” he said.

Colwill, an interior designer in Lutherville who comes from a family of jockeys, said two of the paintings that will be shown at Liriodendron, “Midnight Foal” and “Day-old Foal,” feature lists of breeding horses.

“Part of what he did was, he was also very involved in the Maryland Jockey Club in the ‘30s, as was my grandfather, who knew Flannery,” Colwill said.

Flannery felt painting had much in common with the world of horse breeding and racing.

“It is my observation that a painter always enjoys a conflict between logic and his instincts, and with me instinct always wins,” Flannery once said, according to the Baltimore Museum of Art. “It is much the same in breeding horses. There can be no doubt that the logic of the geneticists is the soundest foundation on which to proceed, but in the end your instinct tells you when you have a really good horse.”

Flannery also made more subtle contributions to Harford County life during his time here.

He designed a woodcut of a horse and groom that was used as the logo for a column in The Aegis, and he also inspired painters such as Lloyd Weaver.

“Mr. Weaver always credited Mr. Flannery for getting started as an artist,” Skowronski said. A retrospective of Weaver’s work was also shown at Liriodendron in 2002.

Flannery bought The Bel Air Times in 1941 and ran it as the Harford Gazette until his death in 1955, at 57 years old.

A smoker, he died from “a little bit of everything, but I think he had a heart attack,” said Jane Webb Smith, who has been doing inventory for Colwill and was brought on board last week to curate the Liriodendron exhibit.

Flannery ultimately created about 250 paintings, many of which were exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1944 and in a memorial exhibition in 1959.

About nine of them were housed at the Pimlico racecourse and lost in a fire that destroyed the clubhouse in 1966.

Skowronski said the Lirodendron exhibit will feature about 20 original works, one of which is coming up from Virginia.

Two paintings held by the Baltimore Museum of Art, “The Maryland Hunt” and “Kelly’s Barn,” will not be shown because of timing and the condition of the paintings, she said.

“We are still in the process of gathering works,” she said.

Webb Smith said she would like the show to highlight Flannery’s sense of humor and is hoping to convince Skowronski to fill the exhibit with his quotes.

“He’s hilarious. He was a very irreverent kind of guy,” she said.

The motto he created for the newspaper he ran went, “Fewer people fall asleep while reading the [Harford Gazette],” she said.

Webb Smith is hoping to get several of his famous paintings of Man o’ War and Will Harbut, the horse’s longtime groom.

“You are not going to see any profiles of horses standing there with a jockey on them,” he said about Flannery’s painting style. “He is much more interested in the composition of the horse and the jockey than the horse and the jockey. It’s much more of a story being told, as opposed to a portrait.”