Carnival at Royalton, Vermont, 1965
Beginning his art career as freelance illustrator, Cecil Crosley Bell lived and worked in New York City, while also spending some thirty summers painting in and around Stockbridge, Vermont. Around the time Bell painted this scene, the town had nearly fourteen hundred full-time residents, but the summer people and folks from the smaller villages all around Royalton would have come to the carnival for a good time, too.
Lyman Orton comments:
Bell explored all the different aspects of life in Vermont. It is as if he couldn’t get enough of what this place was all about. The Royalton carnival was about fifteen miles from the cabin where he lived, not very far, and he may have been to village carnivals like this one many times.