Artist Sperry Andrews dies at 87;

led effort to preserve Weir Farm

Charles Sperry Andrews III, the open air artist who was at the heart of the effort to preserve the physical landscape and artistic legacy of The Weir Farm, died Thursday, July 14, 2005, at Danbury Hospital. He was 87 years old, the husband of the late Doris Bass Andrews, and had lived and painted for 48 years on the Nod Hill Road property that in 1990 became the Weir Farm National Historic Site.

“His vision of a singularly beautiful world inspired all those who knew him,” said his daughter, Catherine Barrett Andrews. “He was unfailingly gracious and polite in his approach to people, and to life itself.”

On her father’s relationship to the farm, which he bought from J. Alden Weir’s son-in-law, Mahonri Young, in 1957, Ms. Andrews quoted Gordon R. Fairburn, a founding member of the Weir Farm Heritage Trust: He was “conservator, anecdotal historian, and, most importantly, painter of the farm’s light, moods, intimate views and landscapes.”

Born Oct. 5, 1917, on Central Park West in New York City to Alice Peterson Andrews and Charles Sperry Andrews II, a Danbury native, he was the third of five children. The family moved to Bronxville, N.Y., in 1920 when his father became president of the newly formed Bronxville Trust Company Bank.

Mr. Andrews attended both public and private schools, and knew from a very young age that art was his field. He began sketching seriously at eight years old.

He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and later at the Art Students League of New York.

Mr. Andrews was in the First Army Division during World War II, serving in Iceland, France, Belgium and Germany from 1941 to 1945. He was in charge of munitions, and took part in the second wave of the invasion of the beaches at Normandy.

It was at Art Students League that he met fellow student Doris Bass, who was his wife for 55 years when she died in 2003. The couple had three children, and in 1948 moved to Ridgefield, living in the old “book barn” on Route 33 on the Wilton line.

As an artist, Mr. Andrews learned of Mahonri Mackintosh Young, the sculptor who was the son-in-law of American Impressionist Julian Alden Weir. When new in town he knocked on Mr. Young’s door Ñ the door of the farmhouse the late Mr. Weir had acquired in 1882 and made a country retreat for a wide circle of turn-of-the-century artist friends, including Albert Pinkham Ryder, Childe Hassam, John Twachtman and John Singer Sargent. It was an artistic legacy that Mr. Andrews grew to deeply appreciate, first as a friend of Mr. Young’s, later as an owner and, eventually, as artist-in-residence at The Weir Farm.

The Andrews bought the main Weir farmhouse and surrounding property after Mr. Young’s death in 1957. They lived there, painting, raising their children, and summering on Block Island. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews also became friends with Cora Weir Burlingham, another of Mr. Weir’s daughters, who donated substantial portions of her nearby property to Nature Conservancy as the Weir Preserve.

In the late 1970’s, as the property in the area began to succumb to land development pressures, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews began a grass roots effort to preserve the land for future enjoyment by the public and artists. Both Sperry and Doris Andrews devoted tremendous amounts of time and energy to preserving the property and insuring that others recognized its importance in the history of art in America.

After years of work by many people and with invaluable assistance from The Nature Conservancy, The Trust for Public Land, the State of Connecticut and various politicians, most notably U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, their efforts were crowned with success in 1990 with the creation of the Weir Farm National Historic Site, the only national park site in the country that celebrates American painting.

While the Weir Farm became the property of the federal government, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews retained life use of the main farmhouse and each continued to live and paint there to near the end of their days.

Completely aside from his involvement in preserving the Weir Farm, Mr. Andrews was an accomplished and well recognized artist Ñ largely, though not exclusively, as a landscape painter.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Columbus Gallery of Fine Art, the National Academy of Design and the New Britain Museum of American Art.

He had one-man exhibitions at the Lacardia Gallery and Feragil Gallery in New York, the Lyme Academy of Art, and locally at the Katonah Gallery, Bethel Gallery and Westport’s Kipnis Gallery. His work has also been exhibited at The National Academy of Arts and Letters and the Slater Memorial Musuem in Norwich, among others.

“Sperry Andrews paints year round out-of-doors,” New Britain Museum of American Art Director Charles Ferguson wrote in 1983. “...His paintings are completed on the spot, not the usual ‘sketch from the field, redo it in the studio’ scheme...

“That is undoubtedly why Sperry Andrews’ paintings and drawings have such freshness and harmony of light, color and line. One may find traces of Cubism and the Orient in his work but he has developed a blend which is uniquely all his own.

“Dedicated to his profession, a model of self-discipline and perseverance, Sperry Andrews is a painter’s painter whose work reveals great beauty all about us.”

Mr. Andrews’ work has won many art awards and prizes, including the First Julius Hallgarten Prize, the John Pike Memorial Award and the Certificate of Merit of the National Academy of Design, the William Bradford Green Memorial Prize for Landscape from the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, and the Salmagundi Club Award for U.S. Citizen at the 20th Annual Exhibition, Audubon Artists, in New York.

He was elected a member of the Century Association in 1993 and made an Academician of the National Academy of Design in 1994.

Mr. Andrews is survived by three children: Catherine Barrett Andrews of Madison, Ga., and Ridgefield; Charles Sperry Andrews IV of Sedona, Ariz.; and Albert Ballard Andrews of Wilton. He leaves seven grandchildren, including: Sebastian, Benjamin and Nathaniel Andrews of Wilton; Catie Scarlett Andrews-Jackson of Madison, Ga., and Ridgefield; Sabrina Lord-Linde of Moscow, Russia; Maximillian Andrews-Lindberg of Ecuador; and Gioia Gaia Bonci of Italy.

Mr. Andrews was buried in a simple private ceremony Tuesday, July 19, at Hillside Cemetery in Wilton. A memorial service is planned, in connection with a show of his artwork, at the Weir Farm in mid to late September.

Contributions in his memory may be made to The Weir Farm Trust, 735 Nod Hill Road, Wilton, CT. 06897.