A new wing at Manchester’s Southern Vermont Arts Center, illustrated here by the Richmond-based Birdseye architecture and building company, is set to open next summer.
MANCHESTER — Over the decades that Vermont Country Store owner Lyman Orton has amassed what Yankee magazine has called “the largest private collection of 20th-century Vermont art in the world,” the 83-year-old has hung his paintings at home, the office, seemingly everywhere but a single, permanent site.
Then Orton gathered them two years ago for a state tour that began at Manchester’s Southern Vermont Arts Center.
“This collection should end up here,” he recently recalled thinking about the arts center, “so my kids don’t sell it at a yard sale.”
Orton assured he’s just joking about his three sons, the third generation to run the family’s multimillion-dollar retail and catalog business. But he’s serious about wanting a place to share his more than 250 paintings in perpetuity. That’s why he’s breaking ground on a two-story addition to the arts center that’s set to open next summer.
“We are aligned with Lyman on the vision that this should be a public resource,” Amelia Wiggins, the arts center’s executive director, said of showcasing the collection. “We know the beauty of this area is such a draw, and art that captures it compels both locals and visitors.”
The new 12,000-square-foot wing is expected to cost $8.5 million, with related sitework raising the project up to nearly $10 million, according to a state land use permit. The building will be funded by a $14.5 million capital campaign that’s hit 90% of its goal.
“We’re not just constructing galleries, we’re creating space for freedom of expression and bold ideas,” said Bob Van Degna, president of the arts center’s board of trustees and, along with Orton, a top project donor.
Vermont Country Store owner Lyman Orton has collected more than 250 paintings of everything from covered bridges to clotheslines. Photo courtesy of Lyman Orton
‘What’s the story behind it?’
The wing now under construction is a full circle moment for Orton, who was 5 years old when his parents founded the Vermont Country Store in the nearby town of Weston in 1946.
Orton grew up in the unplugged days before the interstate and internet as artists working with oils, watercolors and woodblock ink “came up from down country” to capture the landscape and lifestyles of Vermont.
“They didn’t just pass through,” he recalled in an interview. “They started living here, painted what they loved.”
A group calling itself the Southern Vermont Artists displayed its work on the lawn of Manchester’s Equinox hotel and inside the gym of the nearby Burr and Burton Academy before purchasing the property that would become the arts center in 1950.
Turning 20 a decade later, Orton started his own collection, not knowing he was seeding a lifelong mission to “repatriate” Vermont art sold and scattered over the decades across the country and around the world.
When choosing pieces, Orton has looked for artists such as Luigi Lucioni, whose oils and etchings appear in the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Kyra Markham, an actress, painter and printmaker who was briefly married to the son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright; and Ogden Pleissner, nationally recognized for his Life magazine work and sporting scenes.
But Orton has ultimately focused on the art itself. Take Rockwell Kent’s 1926 depiction of Sunderland’s Union Church. Many see the canvas for its creator, whose works are displayed at the National Gallery of Art. Orton has appreciated it for memorializing the place his great-grandfather helped build.
“I look for paintings that have a ‘there’ there,” he said. “What is it? Where is it? What’s the story behind it?”
A sign announces the construction of a new wing at Manchester’s Southern Vermont Arts Center. Photo by Kevin O’Connor/VTDigger
‘Art accessible to everybody’
When the collector debuted the traveling show “For the Love of Vermont: The Lyman Orton Collection” in 2023, he grouped both minor and master works into themes such as “Making A Living,” which pictured sugaring, slate quarrying and sawmills, and “Coming Together,” which portrayed families, fairs and ice fishing.
Amid paintings of barns and covered bridges, Orton has an affinity for depictions of clotheslines, be it Leo Blake’s circa 1940 “Summer Laundry” or Mitzi Goward’s “Out to Dry.”
“There is nothing more consistent with a Vermonter’s heritage of practicality, frugality and common sense than hanging the washing outside,” he said of the latter work. “Sunshine and the breeze are free.”
Similarly, Orton traded discreet museum labels for large-print signs more familiar in a school or senior center.
“That makes the art accessible to everybody, not just experts and Chardonnay sippers,” he said.
The traveling show included a postscript requesting “new, corrected or missing information” about the people and places illustrated but not necessarily identified in the art. In response, visitors from Manchester, Vermont, to Manchester, England, offered dozens upon dozens of comments.
“One woman left a card that tells it all,” Orton recalled. “She said, ‘Dear Lyman, I had to drag my husband to the show — and then I had to drag him out.’”
The state tour went on to attract crowds at the Bennington Museum, Montpelier’s Vermont Historical Society and the Manchester Community Library. But each location could only squeeze in a fraction of the full collection.
“It’s 250, 300, 400 paintings,” Orton said of the ever-changing total. “I’m not being coy. I bought 15 paintings in the last two months, just because things happen to come up. But because there’s so much art, it creates the opportunity to have a scheduled rotation.”
The Southern Vermont Arts Center is expecting to exhibit about 75 works in the new wing and keep the rest in a climate-controlled storage space for future viewing.
The addition, designed by the Richmond-based Birdseye architecture and building company, will include a second general exhibition gallery and a patio for outdoor events. But Orton’s collection promises to be the main draw.
“By being the highest bidder on the dozens of artworks of Vermont that Lyman Orton saw go up for sale at local country auctions, he made himself every Vermonter’s heir,” author Anita Rafael wrote in the collection’s 2023 catalog. “By keeping the art of Vermont in Vermont, it is tacitly being passed down to all Vermonters.”