Annotations from the Archives: On Reappraisal

The archives are built upon the art and the science of memory. The processes used in cataloging, arranging, and caring for collections are the science; they are reproducible and logical and the end result is a logbook of objects and their condition, location, and statistics. But those data points only tell a portion of the story, and that’s where the art comes in. Every object, every paper, is a part of a web that interconnects and weaves together the lives of every person who touched the collection: not merely the subjects of the collections themselves and their families, friends, and correspondents, but the creators and curators of the collection, and their networks of colleagues and influences, too. Think of a television detective’s “crazy-wall” of evidence and yarn-linked people, places, and ideas, and you get a sense of the connections and influences at play in the archives, too.

One tool of the archivist’s trade is systematic, thoughtful reappraisal. Objects and collections undergoing reappraisal are inventoried and evaluated, and their connections to the archive—their provenance, their importance to research, their value as interpretive objects—are thoughtfully considered, too. Though the process is lengthy and labor-intensive, it allows an archivist—and by extension, the archives’ users—to synthesize all the available information and really know the collection in a way that is impossible through entries on a spreadsheet. This process is underway in our collections now, as we revisit and reappraise many of the objects acquired when the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial was a nebulous new idea, yet to be shaped. Our WCPM collection holds six pieces created by Grant Reynard (1887-1968), a Grand Island native who went on to become an illustrator, educator, painter, and poet; he studied with South Dakota painter Harvey Dunn, who had in turn studied under Howard Pyle, the illustrator who had so inspired Willa Cather as a child. Though the Reynard paintings hold a treasured place in our collections, their provenance was unclear. The answers we needed, however, were found in a recently uncovered folder of correspondence in our Mildred Bennett Collection.

In September 1947, just a few months after Willa Cather’s death, Mildred Bennett, newly settled in Red Cloud after the wartime service of her husband, Dr. Wilber K. Bennett had ended, began studying Willa Cather. During this early time she contacted many acquaintances, friends, and relatives, inquiring about their willingness to speak about the author. The Mildred Bennett Collection at the National Willa Cather Center is full of such letters, but only rarely does one elicit such an eloquent and gracious response as the letter she wrote to Grant Reynard.

“Dear Mr. Raynard [sic],” she began. “I am making a study of Willa Cather and her interest in art and artists. I understand you met her, at one time, and that you had some conversation with her. Would it be possible for me to talk with you sometime when you are out in this part of the country?”

At the time of Bennett’s letter, Reynard was engaged with the Association of American Colleges Arts Program and traveled extensively, lecturing on art while continuing to create his own paintings and sketches. His career—as a magazine illustrator and art director with publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar and more—had blossomed into something bigger, and he loved giving Willa Cather much of the credit.

“Dear Mrs. Bennett,” Reynard replied. “I am sorry to have been so long in answering your letter and I will be delighted to write you a little later of a wonderful talk I had with Willa Cather years ago in New Hampshire.” He explained that he was leaving for a month of lectures in “Virginia and the South,” but had recently finished a watercolor of the Cathers’ home (the Cather Second Home on Seward Street) and visited with acquaintances of Cather’s while there.

In January 1948, Reynard returned from his lecture circuit; his recent speaking engagements, he wrote, had featured Willa Cather and the crucial suggestions that she had given him during their meeting. Before Reynard recounted his talk with Cather, he offered the watercolor painting of the Cather home to Bennett for $125, less 25% if anyone in Red Cloud wanted it. “It is one of the best paintings I have made and I have exhibited it in many colleges where of course the English departments are most interested.”

What follows formed the basis for several later published versions of Reynard’s memory of a fateful conversation with Willa Cather. A Measure of Vision (1966) recalled that afternoon, and posthumously, the Prairie Schooner published an expanded version under the title “Willa Cather’s Advice to a Young Artist.” Later still, Sharon Hoover, in her collection Willa Cather Remembered, republished the Prairie Schooner version. The letter to Bennett, however, is stripped to its essence: how Reynard met Cather, the tidbits of information he had gleaned from mutual friends, their conversation over tea. (A transcript follows, below.)

The encounter, he wrote, caused him to reevaluate everything. “I was completely lost for almost a year,” Reynard remembered, reconsidering everything from the subjects he chose to the mediums he used to depict them; eventually, Reynard said, “It percolated through my confusion that this great lady had done me a great service in talking about herself. . . . So you see the great debt which I felt I owed to Willa Cather who had uncovered the native honesty which I had smothered with much rubbish and had freed me to the great and thrilling experience of drawing and painting people and places which I really wanted to. I have been passing this experience on to students all over the country in my lectures in unending gratitude to Willa Cather.”

As Reynard’s 1972 version of the recollection states, he intended to repay this debt by presenting the watercolor of the Cather Second Home to the author in New York, but it wasn’t to be; Cather died shortly after Reynard inquired about making an appointment, and a few short months after that, he sold the painting to Mildred Bennett personally. Reynard’s correspondence with Bennett continued, however, and in 1958, he wrote, “I am sending to you today . . . six items of my work which I want to present to the Willa Cather Foundation Memorial Museum I am not sure that I am correct in this name . . . but in any case I am delighted to make this gift because of the great service which Willa Cather rendered to me as a younger artist when I was working at the MacDowell Colony.”

Reynard donated three watercolors, one lithograph, and two etchings to the collection. “All of these are subjects for which the drawings were made directly on the spot in my home state Nebraska. . . . I feel there is a great deal of Willa Cather feeling in all three of the prints, especially in the Nebraska lithograph. I I hope to visit Red Cloud sometime again on my trips West and paint there again.” Though much of the information contained in Reynard’s 1948 letter is collected elsewhere, it has the unpolished sincerity of an impromptu conversation; Cather’s impact on his life and career comes out in a rush of emotion that bears all the “native honesty” of Reynard’s paintings, and that tells us something new about the Reynard pieces in our collection. These weren’t purchased pieces, acquired with an intent of furnishing a room or their collectability. These were heartfelt tributes to a mentor, an acknowledgment of a debt that could never fully be repaid. Just as Cather’s words caused Reynard to re-examine his own work, Reynard’s words help us to see these six pieces in a new light, with new meaning and new relevance to our collections.

Aside from our WCPM and Mildred Bennett Collections, information was also taken from:
An American Art Colony, by Paul H. Mattingly
“Grant Reynard,” Museum of Nebraska Art