The Bennington

Photograph of Eric Sloane painting

This past week my wife and I visited The Bennington, an art gallery and museum in Bennington, Vermont. It is a good-sized museum for such a rural setting. It has a covered bridge museum, national fine art exhibitions, native american fine art and a bird carving gallery. The bird carvings are outstanding with amazing details such as the tongues in open-mouthed birds. The painting on the birds truly give them a life-like quality. The bird carver is Floyd Scholz.

We learned much about the covered bridges of Windham County, in Vermont where we live. For example, in the last century, an individual in Townsend, Vermont, tried roofing the local bridge during the night, which ended up spooking a rider's horse. They had a state map depicting all the locations of covered bridges in Vermont, and, as you can imagine, there has been a major reduction in their numbers. Also, we learned that the creamery bridge in West Brattleboro got it's name because there was a creamery on the other side of the bridge.

Within the covered bridge museum exhibit is a feature on Eric Sloane, a prolific oil painter who was believed to have painted over 15,000 paintings. I have always admired his pen and ink drawings of rural scenes and tools. A few years ago, we saw his massive mural on clouds and the atmosphere at the National Air and Space Museum when we visited Washington, D.C.