From 1921 to 1925, Rockwell Kent lived only a few miles from this church in Sunderland, Vermont. He would have been familiar with the location of this church. Here is the story of how Lyman Orton came to repatriate this painting to Vermont from California.

In 2007, Lyman was leafing through a book titled And So Goes Vermont, edited and published in 1937 by his father, Vrest Orton. A photograph of the Union Church in Sunderland was captioned “where Rockwell Kent painted Mother & Chicks” and it caught Lyman’s attention. Jamie Franklin, the curator at Bennington Museum, provided Lyman with the painting’s history.

A year later Lyman learned that a gallery in San Francisco was selling Mother & Chicks (which Kent had retitled Puritan Church). Lyman contacted the seller at once and after more than a year of negotiations brought the piece home to Vermont. Kent had used artistic license and placed the gravestones next to the church although they are actually across the road – thus, Mother (the church) and Chicks (the gravestones). Lyman’s mother, Mildred Ellen Orton, née Wilcox, was born in 1911 on the Wilcox farm, just a mile up the road from the Union Church. Her family had attended the church and she held fond memories of it.

Leo Blake’s painting is a winter scene of parishioners arriving at church, and there are a few extra clues in the painting as to what church was like in Vermont on a winter’s day. Lyman Orton can tell part of that story:

Some of the people we see here are arriving at the church by horse-drawn sleigh. Families that owned automobiles or trucks might have found their old sleigh to be better transportation on a steep, snow-packed road.

Leo Blake was originally from Galesburg, Illinois and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. After a short burst of work as a commercial artist, he turned to fine art. He lived and worked in Massachusetts in Berkshire County, and painted scenes throughout New England.

John “Jack” Atherton’s lithograph is of a church near his Vermont home in Arlington. He was born in Brainerd, Minnesota. After studying art at the College of the Pacific and the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, he used prize money he won at an exhibition in 1929 to fund his trip east to study and work in New York City. A few years later, he held his first one-man show in Manhattan.

He was highly respected and successful as an illustrator, and a long list of American museums have added his illustrations and fine art paintings to their collections.