A Berkshire Sampler

I call this drawing a Berkshire sampler because it contains nine small sketches of things or places in Berkshire County that are particularly interesting or beautiful. Berkshire County is in Western Massachusetts. It is a summer resort area with many very serious cultural attractions, especially in the category of preforming arts. Tanglewood is here, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Tanglewood, as it’s name implies, is a huge area of beautifully landscaped grounds with gentile hills, large meadows, and ancient trees of great beauty. It not a manicured beauty, but a beauty rough about the edges just like a Hudson River School painting, which it is really connected to geographically.

Looking at my drawings left to right from the top: The first image is Hawthorne Street looking South. The big hedge of bushes on the left is .over twelve feet high and forms the border of the Tanglewood property. Out of the hedge rises a large tree part way down the road, this is the Lion’s Gate entrance to the grounds, so named because of the lion sculptures on top of flanking pedestals at the entrance. This view is especially interesting because it contains the entrance to the grounds used by non-paying teenagers, attending popular music concerts. At the extreme left bottom of the hedge is a little tunnel through the hedge which also passes safely through two chain link fences which run down the center of the hedge. I have never used this entrance, my daughters pointed it out to me one day.

The second image is one of the lion faces from the lion’s gate entrance. The third image is what you see if you look to the right when you are looking at image number one. This is the view looking South from Hawthorne Street. Here the land falls sharply away cut by rows of trees at intervals which were formerly the borders of farmers fields. These big fields are also giant parking lots whenever there is a concert. There are three of these big grassy fields bordered by trees and then your eye gets to Stockbridge Bowl, a very round lake that can be seen right in the middle of the drawing. After the lake the landscape rises up again with a series of receding hills. It is just this tendency of the landscape here, to rise up and down, cut by open fields and variegated patched of various types and colors of trees that makes this landscape so famous for it’s beauty. It is really like the Isle of the Sirens in the Tale of Odysseus, once you see it you can’t tear yourself away from it.

Hawthorne Street, of the first three images, is so named because at one time Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there. I decided to do a drawing of the famous Hawthorne House which is almost directly across from the Lions’ Gate, but I was amazed to find that the original house burned down over a hundred years ago. The house in the drawing is the very next house after where the Hawthorne house once stood. It is a modest little house but one of my favorite houses in Berkshire County. It is old, unpainted stucco, with an orange Mediterranean tile roof. What looks like two entrances is really a door and a symmetrical opening for a porch.

I thought if I made mention of Hawthorne in my set of drawings I should also include another equally famous American author who lived here. In Pittsfield is Arrowhead, the home of Herman Melville. He lived in a large very ordinary looking New England farm house. I went there but could find nothing I wanted to draw. When I was leaving however I came across this very beautiful piece of sky at the back of the visitor parking lot, so I have included that. It is drawing number five, right in the center. Here again, as in the Tanglewood images, the landscape shows the sky to best advantage by dropping down a long way into a valley, and then rising up again in the distance clothed in blue like the sky itself.

The next image is more up to date. This is the Lenox Coffee Shop in the Town of Lenox. This is my favorite place to drink coffee and read a book on a summer afternoon. I am sure there are many people who believe two dollars is too much to pay for coffee but I am not among them. To have an equivalent coffee drinking experience you would absolutely have to fly to someplace in Europe, and that would cost at least $1200 by today’s rates. So every time I have coffee here I feel that i have saved myself a thousand dollars at least, and soon, at the rate I am going, I will be able to buy the little stucco house on Hawthorne Street.

The seventh drawing brings us back to Hawthorne Street again but this time looking North. I put this view in for three reasons, first because it shows how in just one spot there are interesting views in all directions, but also because of a detail. The trees and foliage grow over the road in a full simple arch and the road passes through a tunnel of foliage as it dips and turns around a bend. As an experience, if you are driving, this is equal to the most sophisticated V.W commercial. Also, this view has a hill in the background where once stood the gigantic summer home of Andrew Carnegie. The Carnegie estate was called Shadowbrook, and it succumbed to a huge fire long ago just like the Hawthorne house. Carnegie was just another one of a great many famous people past and present who chose to live here, though they could have lived anywhere.

No survey is complete without a restaurant recommendation, and for this I include my favorite. The eighth image is the D’Amico hot dog stand just South of Great Barrington, on Route Seven. This is the best place to eat ,complete with picnic benches of peeling red paint under the shade of five or six towering pines. Across Route Seven, and just a few steps North of the hot dog stand is an old piece of rusting farm equipment, I only noticed it because I was walking up the highway looking for a good place to do the Hot Dog Stand drawing. It is down in a depression and I include it because I was reminded of how there used to be farms and old farm equipment all over this landscape and now there are none, the same is true of the hot dog stand, this is our only one.

Dimensions:7.75” x 9.75”
Materials: Pencil on cream color drawing paper
Signature: Along the bottom edge: Richard Britell, July 27, 2002