Off subject for a moment: On the death of Natasha Richardson

March 19, 2009
Posted by Noah

I’d like to take a few minutes this morning to go just a little off-subject for this blog, though you’ll see that – with my typical breathtaking flair as a writer, ha-ha – that we will ultimately come back. It is a bit grim what I have in mind, to write a bit about the sudden death of famed stage and screen actress Natasha Richardson, wife of actor Liam Neeson. Believe it or not, I had a connection to the couple – not big, but enough to warrant some reflection.

For the second day in a row I find myself transported again to New York’s Hudson Valley.

When I was first starting out as a journalist, as I’ve written before in this blog, I worked for a chain of weekly papers based in a town named Millbrook. Being so close, but just far enough, from NYC, it was home to many famous people. Those that moved there loved the place as a haven from the hysteria of celebrity worship, and the “regular folks” of the town were fiercely protective of these people, and went out of their way to treat them like regular folk. It works quite well, actually. Among the many that live(d) in Millbrook are/were Richardson, Neeson and their two sons.

I eventually became editor of the Millbrook Round Table, the local paper. As editor, I was also a reporter, photographer and layout artist. If you’ve worked in small newspapers, then you know what I mean. As editor in Millbrook I had occasion to know many of the people that lived there, if not by name, at least to say hello to them at the local diner, coffee or antiques shop. Liam Neeson was well-known for riding his motorcycle along the gorgeous and secluded back roads of The Hudson Valley, and one day – it was a Wednesday, I believe, in fall of 2000 – he collided with one of the numerous deer in the area, suffering a crushed pelvis.

I had the good fortune, a week or two after the incident, to be able to go to the home he and Ms. Richardson shared with their boys to interview him about it. It was a normal enough interview, pleasant and no longer than it needed to be. She answered the door, a resplendent beauty in blue jeans, served me a cup of tea – pouring the cream, but not measuring the sugar – and their boys toddled around as toddlers do. I interviewed her husband, then we all chatted pleasantly for a few minutes after the interview about theater, literature and American history. I then took my notebook, shook both of their hands, and left. I was struck by how normal they seemed, even in a place where the famous strove extra hard to be normal.

I’m sorry that she has died, I’m sorry for the pain Liam Neeson must feel, and most of all I hurt for their now teenage sons, whose sadness must know no measure. It is a cruel trick of fate, but death is indiscriminate. None of us gets out alive, no matter how much time and energy we expend ignoring this fact. If, in her death, Natasha Richardson has given people a chance to remember her considerable accomplishments, re-connect with the love in their hearts, to contemplate the fate which awaits us all, and to touch so many people who never knew they could be touched – myself included – then I count her life well lived and her death not in vain.

There is also a Richardson connection to Heritage – albeit small – in the form of two lots in our archives that bear her name. One is a movie poster for the creep John Carpenter movie Gothic, which I hated, and the other is a somewhat odd, and now oddly moving, baseball signed by both she and her husband. It sold for $18 in 2007, with BP.

A view of the Hudson River Valley from the banks of The Trinity

March 18, 2009
Posted by Noah

Okay, so Heritage World HQ is not exactly on the banks of the Trinity, but it’s close enough. We can see the river from the numerous windows on the south side of the building bearing our name. The Trinity, however, is simply a wonderfully clever device – if I say so myself – to make the title of this post work.

What it actually refers to is an amazing major gathering of American paintings – The Buchanan Collection of American Art – that will be auctioned here in June as part of our American Art Auction. The auction is shaping up to be stellar, without a doubt, and that includes some amazing paintings beyond Buchanan. There is one painting, among the many landmark names, that made me sit up right away and take notice. Near Leeds, an 1869 oil on canvas by Hudson River School luminary George Inness. The painting is, in a word, breathtaking.

Anyone who knows me well – Anyone? Anyone? – knows that I have a deep and abiding love for the Hudson River School painters. This came during the decade in which I lived there, in and around Rhinebeck and Red Hook – just above Poughkeepsie, two hours north of NYC – when I worked as a reporter, editor and antiques and art writer. I drove the roads that skirted the Catskill Mountains and peered onto the Hudson, the very views that painters like Frederick Church – I spent many a pleasant afternoon hiking around his amazing Olana estate – and Thomas Cole and Inness, among others, painted with such passion and detail that their influence over the subsequent generations of American painters has yet to diminish.

During the years I traveled that hallowed American landscape I came to know it as a place where America’s history took place. The American Revolutionary War is represented by buildings, plaques, furniture, roads, estates and any vast number of places that bore direct witness to the birth of this amazing country. From that history, The Hudson River Painters were born. They captured the light, the angles and the shadows of the Hudson Valley, but more so they captured the gravitas of the astounding beauty of the place. Just writing about it makes my heart ache to be back there now, as spring brings those amazing vistas to life with a veritable bursting chrysanthemum of varied colors. It is indeed the very view-shed of America, the way in which the northern population centers of young America came to identify itself. It’s very hard for me to write about it with writerly detachment, so much do I love the place…

Inness’s Near Leeds is a masterpiece of middle period Hudson River Valley painting. It looks east towards the mighty river, barely discernible in the distance. Here’s what Marianne Berardi, Heritage’s Senior Art Fine Arts Expert, wrote about the painting in the upcoming Heritage Magazine:

“The verdant scene is calm and the space is beautifully constructed,” she writes. “A woman and her child sit on a log in the right foreground, watching a horse-drawn cart descend along a road, which carves through the heart of the composition and takes the viewer’s imagination along the same path. The greatest force in the painting is the light streaming through the gate on the right, and filtering through the delicate screen of trees.”

Well put, indeed. I’m very excited about this painting, about the amazing Buchanan Collection – which I will certainly cover in more detail in a later post closer to the auction – and about the American Art Auction in general. This is a major auction and it should go a long way toward showing art collectors in this nation that Heritage is a serious player on the scene. I’m glad I get to be around to bear witness to it.

The catalog for the auction is not fully online yet, minus a good handful of works, so you’ll have to accept this little teaser as a taste of the good things to come. Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait.