When poet, writer and editor Elizabeth Spencer Spragins of Fredericksburg travels the globe, her antennae are tuned to sacred echoes in the natural and manmade world, the consequences of which are the very personal and lyrical Celtic verse forms that s …

Recently in my research I ran across a letter composed by the wife of Gari Melchers that I think is worth sharing. In it Mrs. Melchers recounted an episode that occurred during the couple’s residence in Germany from 1909 to 1915. Gari Melchers was call …

We have recently turned our traditional historic house tour on its ear.  The standard 30-minute, guided docent monologue has been torn apart and put back together in a whole new way.  One of the best preserved artist homes and working studios …

Sitting in a doctor’s office a few years ago, I picked up an old copy of Neurology Now and read an article that intrigued me as a museum educator.  The author described a new tour, Meet Me at MoMA, introduced by the Museum of Modern Art 2006 to sp …

Reproduced in the 2019 Summer issue of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Magazine is a 1930 portrait painted by Gari Melchers of John Barton Payne.  The caption with it announces a new practice being instituted by museum conservators to display on-going …

Sometimes when our guests enter the dining room and encounter the monumental painting Market Scene (above, 12′ x 7′) they profess to having seen it somewhere before. Are they imagining it? Probably not!  Many of our guests are true globetrotters who mi …

Gari Melchers Home and Studio docent Murray Corliss contributed to this post. This life cast, or three-dimensional plaster cast made from a mold of a living body, is placed high on a Dutch cabinet in Gari Melchers’ Falmouth studio quietly watching over …

Our guests often ask if the unusual pink wall color in the studio’s gallery rooms is original to Gari Melchers’ time. The answer is no. The color was chosen about a decade ago by the architects who worked on the studio’s renovation. They felt it would …

Earlier this week, Mark Mitchell, Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery, visited Gari Melchers Home and Studio in preparation for an exhibition he is organizing under the working title The Expressive …

Much to our delight, our conservators have been busily cranking out refurbished canvases this fall, thanks to generous gifts from the Margaret Walker Purinton Conservation Fund and our Giving Day contributors. Come see what your gifts have made possibl …