[You might need a fresh cup of coffee to go with this post, it’s a long one.]
View the Gallery to see all Newt Thomas related artworks in the Lyons Redstone Museum collection and more.
While January 2024 marked the official beginning of my sabbatical leave to work on this project, I’ve been steadily working around the edges of it for a year in preparation for digging in this spring.
As explained in the first post, a stop for a picnic lunch in Lyons on my summer vacation in 2022, inspired this project. After the 2022-2023 academic year began, I applied for a long-overdue sabbatical for Spring 2024. While I had considered doing research on Newt previously in 2002 and again in 2016, other pressing duties always got in the way and the project never got traction. A sabbatical was just what I needed.
If you’re not familiar with academia, you might wonder what a sabbatical is and why it matters. My professional life is compartmentalized into teaching, research, and service. When not teaching, preparing for classes, or grading, I have many other, sometimes time-consuming, duties such as serving on committees that help guide university and departmental functions, academic advising, recruiting events, and coordinating and attending special events. Deep sustained research, plus all the things I often put off doing during the academic year, are often delayed until the summer months.
Derived from the word “sabbath,” the Jewish and Christian day of rest, an academic sabbatical provides short-term leave from teaching and service duties. It’s intended to provide the time needed to refresh connections to one’s field of study, usually through a research project.
I am fortunate and very grateful to have been awarded one. At my university, tenured faculty are eligible for a sabbatical for every seven years of service and, given our limited resources and strong faculty, sabbaticals are competitive and not automatically granted. What follows is an outline of circuitous path of research I’ve been engaged in for the past year in preparation for sabbatical. In subsequent posts I’ll focus on specific paintings and how I’m piecing together Newt’s life.
March 2023
After knowing a sabbatical was forthcoming, I perused old notes and contacted the Lyons Redstone Museum Collections Manager, Monique Sawyer-Lang, in early March about my sabbatical plan. Monique’s response was enthusiastic and, to my surprise, she attached an old photo of the painting I own to her reply, curious to know if it was the painting I’d inherited. The photo, driftless in museum files without any explanatory note, was a good example of how easily objects can be separated from context. Until identified, it was like Newt Thomas’ paintings, a tangible object without much content or meaning to anchor it in time or place.
Monique informed me that the museum had acquired more paintings by Newt since my last visit. A donation of nineteen paintings had been received in 2016 and had never been displayed as the museum was hoping to learn more about the artist first. It made me feel even better about this project knowing that I could help them with something they had interest in doing but so far had been unable to realize.
Following up, Monique sent a packet of information including an excerpt from a local family’s oral history that mentioned paintings by Newt on the wall of a movie theatre, and notes from Diane Benedict, a researcher and writer of local histories who had surveyed the Lyon’s Cemetery around 2013. Benedict’s notes included biographical details derived from census records available through Ancestry.com in 2013, and an updated burial record from a Lyons Cemetery records digitization project.
The burial record does not include a plot number indicating that his final resting place may be either unmarked or in a potter’s field. When I visit Lyons this spring, I hope to walk the cemetery, just in case a headstone or marker has been overlooked. The Longmont mortuary noted on the burial record, Howe Mortuary, is one that I’m familiar with from attending family funerals there. I’ve recently sent an inquiry to them to see if they have retained records from 1940.
The packet also included a big surprise….
Suddenly, I had a face to put with a name!
I have so many questions and a few clues about this image and the accompanying text. It will be the subject of a forthcoming post.
April 2023
Conversations with Monique continued, especially regarding the 2016 donation. She shared copies of the emails between LaVern Johnson, then Director of the Lyons Redstone Museum, museum staff, and Vicki Miles, the donor from Portland, Oregon. Vicki and her late husband, Merlyn, had owned the Multnomah Mercantile, an antique shop in Portland when they acquired the paintings in 1980s, and had kept them after closing the shop in 1994. Reading through the email thread, I realized that the donor had called LaVern in August, just one month after my 2016 visit. In one email message, LaVern had even mentioned me as a recent visitor interested in the artist.
After reading the email exchange I contacted Vicki by email. In LaVern’s email message describing their initial phone conversation, LaVern mentioned “Murray estate.” When I asked Vicki about it, she could not recall details of the purchases other than they were likely acquired at an estate sale. She also said that from time to time she and her husband had tried to research the paintings. LaVern in one of the 2016 emails explained that the newspaper article with the photo had led Vicki to make the connection to Lyons. (I have yet to find the source of the article.)
Vicki told me that she contacted the Lyons Redstone Museum about donating them when she was preparing to move and was downsizing. As an art historian and educator, I am very thankful for her generosity in bequeathing them to a public museum; if she had sold the works or otherwise disposed of them, they would likely have remained unknown.
Learning about these acquisitions was exciting news. More questions were forming, especially regarding how paintings by Newt, assuming they really were by the same Newt Thomas, ended up in Oregon.
In the email exchange, both LaVern and Vicki assumed this portrait, unsigned and identified by a note written on the back of the canvas as Gladness Murray Thomas was Newt’s wife. I would later discover this to be incorrect.
Image: Unknown, Portrait of Gladness Murray Thomas, 1929.
Searching the Colorado Historic Newspapers database, I’d encountered a few references to Newt in The Lyons Recorder (more about newspapers in a future post).
Several mentioned that he left town for months at a time, usually traveling to Nebraska. The paper once reported his experience in California, a place Newt described in unflattering terms. Perhaps on that trip he’d continued up the West coast to Oregon.
To date, I have yet to find any mention of Newt in the Historic Oregon Newspapers database.
May-June 2023
The spring semester ended the first week of May and, while teaching an online May Term course, I began reading three history books I’d ordered from the Lyons Redstone Museum, Denise Berg’s Piecing a Town Together: Families of Lyons, Colorado, Double Gateway to the Rockies: Lyons, Colorado, and Alfred Pace’s, A History of the Lyons Sandstone Quarries.
Seeking advice and insight on how to research little-known person, I scheduled a meeting with Carey Heatherly, Reference Librarian and University Archivist at the University of Montevallo, where I teach. He was generous with his time and knowledge and warned me about the addictive nature of genealogical research (this is true).
Newt does not appear to have been married or to have had children, and whatever remained of his belongings after his death is a mystery. I was (and continue to be) hopeful that, if I could find living relatives, perhaps some memory or physical traces of him, other than his paintings, still remain. I started with a free Ancestry account and then upgraded it to a paid account for access to more documents.
Looking for ways to connect with the Lyons community, I joined a Lyons history group on Facebook and introduced myself and the project. Two short articles I wrote about the project were published in local newspapers, The Redstone Review and the online The Lyons Recorder.
After publication, a Lyons resident who owns a signed painting, a winter landscape with cows and calf, acquired in an estate sale, contacted me.
July 2023
Returning to the museum in July 2023, I was eager to revisit the paintings by Newt I’d last seen 2016 and would be looking at with new perspective and purpose. Additionally, I was curious to see the group of paintings donated in 2016 that I now refer to as “the Portland donation.”
With limited time on this visit, engaging in close looking, an important art history method that I’ll explain in a future post, was not possible. My objectives for this visit were threefold: meet Monique in person, see the paintings, and take reference photos.
Entering the Lyons Redstone Museum, it was much as I had remembered it. The historic red sandstone building, formerly the town’s schoolhouse and later an elementary school classroom until retired in the 1970s, is jam-packed with objects, photographs, documents, and ephemera. It is remarkable that a small community has such dedicated space for preserving its history.
When beginning this project, I was aware of eleven paintings by Newt on display at the museum, two painted directly on a wall in the historic McAllister Saloon building in downtown Lyons (currently Mainstage Brewing), plus the one I inherited from my grandmother—a total of fourteen paintings. The Portland donation comprises nineteen paintings representing a broader range of genres than I’d expected, including landscapes, portraits, a still life, and a seascape.
Here are a few:
From seeing the artworks in person and by continuing to study them from reference photographs over the past few months, it is clear that not all of them are by Newt Thomas.
Eight are signed or annotated on the back by Newt, several others seem to be by a different hand, and two have different signatures, curiously both bearing the same last name, Thomas.
August 2023 – February 2024
The Fall semester began in August and it was a busy one. Even so, I was able to accomplish a few things
While examining the style and content of the paintings in July, I had also been assessing their condition and the way in which they have been stored in the wrappings and boxes in which they were shipped from Portland. A few of the works are fragile and needing conservation.
I investigated better ways to economically store the works archivally. With Monique’s support I applied for a grant from a local foundation in September to purchase materials needed to make storage boxes. Although it was not awarded, the Lyons Historical Society has indicated a willingness to fund the project.
In the last few months, I plunged deeper into the circuitous world of genealogical research. I’ve been able to identify some of the sitters in the portraits, and I’m still working to clarify the associations between Newt and the other artists in the Portland collection.
Who are all these Thomas’ and what are their connections to each other? With a recently added Newspapers.com subscription added to my Ancestry account, I discovered where Newt was going in Nebraska.
There is still so much to share and learn, I look forward to telling you more.
Newt Thomas (1860-1940) 