Three Sketchbooks of Vermont Views, Botanical Subjects, etc.

Vermont (centered around Rutland). 1950s. Some of the drawings are dated -- 1951 or 1953, and we are confident that the vast majority which are undated hail from that decade as well. With 98 separate works of art, 31 of which are watercolors or predominantly so, one is color pencil, the balance being pencil drawings. In two of the albums all the illustrations, per our count, are full page and done directly upon the leaves, while in the third album, the one which also contains the most watercolors (27 of them) and the greatest variety of subject matter, the drawings are mounted onto the leaves mostly, and often two per page. All three albums are spirals, two of which open in an oblong fashion, one with the spiral on the top, and they measure 30.5 by 22.5 cm. Waddington lived in Vermont, in and around Rutland and Chittenden, which is a suburb of Burlington, and among the most striking and charming of her artwork represented here are a watercolor of a Vermont village, a color pencil drawing of a farm, and a regular pencil drawing of a smokehouse. These all have a naive charm, with their loose relation to perspective and divergences from strict realism. The most common subject matter was botanical, which includes bouquets, fruits, leaves and close-up flower studies. These tend to be done with tighter precision than the Vermont outdoor pictures; the watercolors among them would delight many a viewer if they were framed and hung on a wall. Five of the watercolors are costume illustrations which resemble the preliminary sketches done by theater designers in mounting a play. We would guess these are based on pictures from a book, but we do not know the source. There are also a plethora of mountain and lake views, some based on Vermont, some, the Alps. Waddington clearly was an enthusiastic traveler, and so here are some depictions of European buildings -- towers and the like -- and antique furniture that we would associate with the Tyrol and the Alpine regions more generally. All told, the albums are a highly satisfying collection of artwork by a gifted person who was in the graphic arts, decidedly an amateur. Margaret Waddington was born in Paris in 1930, studied medicine at the University of Vermont, and was a successful neurologist who taught at Dartmouth Medical School. Some sheets are loose -- torn from the notebooks. A few of the mounted artworks have also become unglued.