Mother & Chicks, 1926 (Sunderland)

From 1921 to 1925, Rockwell Kent lived only a few miles from this church in Sunderland, Vermont. He would have been familiar with the location of this church. Here is the story of how Lyman Orton came to repatriate this painting to Vermont from California.

In 2007, Lyman was leafing through a book titled And So Goes Vermont, edited and published in 1937 by his father, Vrest Orton. A photograph of the Union Church in Sunderland was captioned “where Rockwell Kent painted Mother & Chicks” and it caught Lyman’s attention. Jamie Franklin, the curator at Bennington Museum, provided Lyman with the painting’s history.

A year later Lyman learned that a gallery in San Francisco was selling Mother & Chicks (which Kent had retitled Puritan Church). Lyman contacted the seller at once and after more than a year of negotiations brought the piece home to Vermont. Kent had used artistic license and placed the gravestones next to the church although they are actually across the road – thus, Mother (the church) and Chicks (the gravestones). Lyman’s mother, Mildred Ellen Orton, née Wilcox, was born in 1911 on the Wilcox farm, just a mile up the road from the Union Church. Her family had attended the church and she held fond memories of it.