The Canajoharie Library & Arkell Museum

The art gallery was founded in 1924, as a public art museum, under the sponsorship of Bartlett Arkell, the first president of Beech-Nut Packing Company. Between 1924 and the opening of the Gallery in 1926, Mr. Arkell visited several museums of art in the United States and Europe and borrowed elements of three galleries for his own art gallery. These were the European Paintings Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Prince George Gallery at the Walker Art Museum in Liverpool, England and the gallery that housed the Night Watch at the Rijkesmuseum in Amsterdam, Holland.

From 1926, until his death in 1946, Mr. Arkell acquired and donated some of the finest American paintings he could acquire. Many of these paintings reflect his own individual taste and include many landscapes of places he found very familiar. Having been born in Canajoharie, a small agriculturally based town in the Mohawk River Valley, many of the landscapes he bought were of rural New York State and the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers in particular. As a student in private schools in Massachusetts and at Yale University, the collector came to admire the New England Landscape. Later, when he bought a summer house in Manchester, Vermont in the 1920s, his love of New England grew, as did his interest in New England landscapes. Lastly, his many trips to Europe each winter, with the exception of the period from 1914-1918 and after 1938, he would visit the low countries, England and France and many of the landscapes he acquired were from these areas.

In terms of painters, Mr. Arkell bought many paintings by Winslow Homer, one of his favorite artists, Childe Hassam and the group of painters known as the Vermont Regionalists. He was close personal friends with Herbert Meyer, Jay Connaway, Luigi Luicioni, and Ogden Pleissner. He commissioned several artists to paint his houses in Vermont and New York (On 10th Street in Manhattan) and knew many of New York's most important artists through his long standing association with the MacBeth Gallery in New York.

The collection is strong in terms of works by Winslow Homer, American Impressionist Painters and American Watercolor Painting. As with many collections founded prior to World War II, it also abounds in portraits of famous men and of the type of woman he found attractive, women with dark hair and eyes. All three of his wives had such hair and eye color. The latter two, the former Louisanna Grigsby and Louise Ryals, were both artists in their own right and took lessons with various New York artists.

The decorative arts collection evolved out of Mr. Arkell's desire to acquire objects of good taste, sculpture, furniture, glass and pottery to place in the library and art gallery. Toward this end, he acquired sculpture from American and French sources, including works by Saint Gaudens, Frishmuth and Remington. He acquired La Laque vases for flower arrangements in the museum and replica furniture made locally for the art gallery. For the Library, many of the early pieces of furniture were from the Stickley Company, then located in Syracuse, New York.

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