Welcome to New Hampton School's Galletly Gallery. I am pleased to have the New Hampton Historical Society host this Fritz Robbins exhibit throughout these hot, summer months. I hope that you will spend some time in the gallery, enjoying and possibly reliving moments of our local history. I also welcome you to return to the gallery to view art on exhibit throughout the academic school year. Enjoy!

Amy Wilson Curry
Director of Fine Arts
The New Hampton School

Collecting the art works of Frederick "Fritz" Robbins for this retrospective exhibit has been a labor of love and a pleasure. Fritz's friends and admirers, in some cases their heirs, have been most generous in lending etchings or paintings. We think you will be as delighted as we have been with the variety of media and subject represented in this show.

It has been nostalgic to reminisce, hearing comments such as,
"We took care of his dog and became good friends" (The Billins of Laconia Animal Hospital)...
"I took care of his eyes" (retired ophthalmologist Ed Wolston)...
"He always brought cinnamon bread when he came to call"...
"I sat for him to do my portrait on Sunday mornings and missed Sunday School."

We are particularly grateful to Marie Forsberg and Phyllis Clairmont, who each have donated a number of small prints, "stories" and letters to the New Hampton Historical Society for its permanent collection, and to New Hampton School for helping to bring these "Lasting Impressions" to longtime, and new, admirers of Frederick Robbins.

Norma Jean "Jinga" Moore, chair
Amy Rand MacDonald
Amy Wilson Curry
Gladys "Randy" Marshall
Lyn O'Callaghan

The Etchings of Frederick Robbins

In 1961 that remarkable organization, the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts, held its annual fair at Hanover in the gymnasium of Dartmouth College. In the broad space of the gym floor craftsmen of many specialties displayed their creations. In their progress from booth to booth at the fair one day two ladies, a mother and a daughter, paused at one where etchings were displayed. A modest, graying, friendly man with a twinkle in his eye greeted them. They noticed a small dog curled up in the corner. In the booth stood a press on which Frederick Robbins from time to time, in accordance with the practice of craftsmen exhibiting at the fair, demonstrated the technique of printing etchings from copper plates. The etchings themselves bore the stamp of the trained and experienced artist. They reflected and interpreted the New Hampshire scene -- the mountains, the pines, the houses, the village church on Sunday morning. They showed common activities of life in a manner which demonstrated an interest in people -- children and grown-ups. The two ladies took away some prints, together with an invitation to visit the artist in his home just outside New Hampton. They would have to take their chances, if they did not wish to be bothered by an exchange of letters, for there was no telephone. In such a way many friends through the years have come to know Frederick Robbins and his work.

Robbins has not always lived in New Hampshire. At various times he worked in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and the Netherlands. He was in middle life when he came to Alexandria, a small village situated in the mountain country near Newfound Lake. With his own hands he built a cabin, a structure in which logs provided about half the materials. With Thoreau, Robbins found it "employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons." The Transcendentalist in his day had commented on the New England scene through his writings. Robbins expressed his ideas in drawings, paintings and, above all, etchings. He was not privately endowed. He had faith that he could make a living through his art. In 1940, the year in which he came to Alexandria, he did two etchings of New Hampshire farmsteads. He chose the dwellings of friends he had made. The pictures not only showed the beauty of old New Hampshire houses but, through the figures of the men and women who lived in them, suggested the quiet stability of a civilization founded on the land which came to focus in the home.

Robbins, an uncompromising individualist, chose, in Robert Frost's words, to take the road "less traveled by." He found it, at times, a hard road. But he carried on. An invitation to provide a sketch, which might be used as a Christmas card, of a kitchen fireplace in an old house just outside New Hampton led ultimately to his marriage. His wife Elsie, an artist in her own right, was a creator of unique dolls whose work was widely known to patrons who came to the shops and fairs of the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts. A sense of history prompted her to make dolls with the costumes and after the manner of the early settlers, who had to find their materials in the products of their clearings. Years of collaboration ended with Elsie's passing, leaving her husband to live and work alone, save for his dog, in the small white house with but one story which stands close by the Pemigewassett River. An ancient maple spreads its branches above the roof. A block of granite, with the drill holes of the quarry showing, forms the doorstep.

When Robbins came to Alexandria as the Great Depression was ending, the encroaching forests were in mid-career in their takeover of the farms on the flanks of the southern foothills of the White Mountains. Horses still had importance on the highways and oxen worked in the fields. The artist merged his life so completely with that of the farms and villages about him that he became indistinguishable from the rural, native-born Yankee. He became part of that life which Frost evoked in "The Hill Wife," "Mending Wall," and "The Death of the Hired Man."

Robbins found a place also in the life of New Hampton. The New Hampton School, which first opened its doors in 1821, dominates the community. Robbins found friends among the masters, especially the Headmaster and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. T. Holmes Moore. New buildings and improved equipment marked the progress of the school in the swift-moving years after World War II. But "Fritz," as the Moores called him, stood fast by his own choice in the midst of change. He has no radio, no television.

"The house has running water during the summer months," Mrs. Moore wrote not long ago in a piece for an affair at the school. "In the winter he must chop a hole in the ice of a nearby brook. One winter the ice was so thick he had to carry blocks of ice back to the house where he thawed them out for water. During the cold months he lives almost completely in one room. He chops wood every day into small chunks, which he piles into symmetrical piles to dry, labeling each pile so he will know which is the driest wood. The room has an old fashioned black wood-burning stove which Fritz uses for heat and to cook on." This room enables the many visitors who come, both in winter and summer, to go back in very truth to an almost vanished age which the artist has evoked in his etchings and from which he has never wished to escape.

Twice recently the Headmaster has asked Robbins to join a panel which discussed with the senior boys the age-old problem of individuality, creativity and conformity. Invariably there was rapport between the artist, now in his seventies, and the school boys, looking forward to going on to college.

Some years ago the campus of the school became the meeting place each summer for a series of scientific conferences. Conference members discovered the artist and his etchings. Because they came, and still come, from Europe and Asia as well as the United States they have given his etchings a worldwide distribution. Robbins no longer has time to participate in the affairs of the League.

In the artist's studio, in addition to the cast-iron stove, stand the press for printing etchings and a much larger press for block press materials. He made the latter press himself and carves the murals on masonite. He prints in three and four colors. One recent block print grew out of an urge to produce a picture which children would find interesting and exciting. Perhaps in this case the urge was reinforced by the desire of the romantic to deal with the far away and the exotic. Out of these influences came the large mural called "Animals of Africa." Dramatically composed and accurately executed, it commands the attention of any child who sees it -- and of any adult as well. It has pleased many children in the United States along with those of a private school for the grades in England. Robbins followed the "Animals of Africa" with one on the Indian tribes of America. The studio also shows watercolors and oils in various stages of development. A violin in the corner, played in the evening at the end of a varied day's work, demonstrates that the man who lives in the small house beside the "Old Bristol Road" does not limit himself to the visual arts.

Robbins' art reaches its apogee in his etchings. He has incised on his copper plates his vision of a rural civilization which, when he came to New Hampshire, was nearing its end. In that northern state, where winter temperatures are frigid and snow drifts deep, nineteenth century husbandmen tied their houses to their barns with sheds which offered a passage from the shelter for the livestock to the living quarters of the family. The etching, "Christmas 't Grandma's," shows such a farmstead to which the son has brought his family by sleigh to celebrate the festival. The cattle and sheep and the chickens and turkeys pictured in the farmyard remind a city-bred generation that our forefathers in a rural civilization adapted their lives to animals as we do to machines. One etching records a custom we shall never see again. "The Snow Roller Gets Through" projects one of the rigors of life before the days of power-driven snowplows when drifts blocked the roads and when cutters and sleighs had to wait for the great roller, drawn by six plunging horses, to pack down the snow and so make the highway passable.

Such etchings suggest one of the important things which Robbins has given to our time. What the lithographs of Currier and Ives do by way of visual record for life in eastern United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, the etchings of Frederick Robbins do for that of northern New England before oxen and horses gave way to the tractor and motor car. But the etchings do more than the Currier and Ives lithographs achieved. Their feeling recalls a remark of Mrs. Moore about the artist: "Maybe it is enough to say that he adds a special extra dimension to the lives of all who are fortunate enough to know him."

New Hampshire Profiles, December 1969
Reprinted with permission.

1. "Autumn Paints the Pemi"
Watercolor
Mason and Jane Westfall

2. "Tatoosh Range, Washington"
Watercolor, 1922
T. Holmes (Bud) and Norma Jean (Jinga) Moore

3. "Mount Rainier from Above Paradise"
Watercolor, 1922
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

4. Meg Farwell
Charcoal
Norm and Peg Farwell

5. Mary Farwell
Watercolor, 1963
Norm and Peg Farwell

6. Nancy Farwell
Watercolor, 1967
Norm and Peg Farwell

7. Heidi Billin
Watercolor
Drs. Robert and Carole Billin

8. "Young Woman"
Pencil
Peter and Alida Millham

9. Shellie Smith
Watercolor
Lyndon (Bob) and Joyce Smith

10. Patty Ann Wilson
Watercolor, 1955
Patricia Clark 11. "California Street, San Francisco"
Etching
Edwin and Maxine Wolston

12. "San Francisco"
Etching, 1929
Edwin and Maxine Wolston

13. "Willows of Chester"
Etching
Edwin and Maxine Wolston

14. "Downtown San Francisco"
Etching
Edwin and Maxine Wolston

15. "Self Portrait"
Oil
New Hampton School

l6. "Schofield Farm"
Oil, 1952
Betsy Schofield

17. "The Village Street"
Oil, 1963
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

18. "The Big Snow of '69"
Copper plate
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

19. "New Year's 1941"
Print
Elibet Chase

20. "Out to the Birches"
Photo
Paul and Amy MacDonald

21. "In the Glen"
Etching
Shirley Noakes

22. "Yosemite Heights"
Etching, 1922
Shirley Noakes

23. "Falmouth Harbor"
Pencil
New Hampton School

24. "Old Ironsides"
Etching
Jim Van Schaik

25. "The Snow Roller Goes Through"
Pencil, 1947
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

26. "Dawn Patrol O'er Lake Winnipesaukee" Etching, 1948
Leo and Polly Sanfacon

27. "Calvin Coolidge Homestead"
Etching
Ben and Helen Shattuck

28. "Longshoremen's Rendezvous"
Etching (Restrike by Jane Burnham)
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

29. "Wayside Inn, Red Horse Tavern 1686"
Etching
Judy Sterndale

30. "Colonial Fireplace"
Etching (Restrike, Jane Burnham)
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

31. "Coolidge Home"
Etching
Ben and Helen Shattuck

32. "Sunday Afternoon"
Tinted etching
Betsy Cook

33. "Four Ox Hitch"
Tinted etching
Faye Clark

34. "Starting to Town"
Tinted etching
Paul and Amy MacDonald

35. "The Village Church"
Tinted etching
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

36. "Time for Chores"
Tinted etching
Rudd Trimble Kenvin and Joan Trimble Smith

37. "Making Maple Syrup"
Tinted etching
Betsy Cook

38. "Trimble Home, N.J."
Pencil, 1942
Rudd Trimble Kenvin and Joan Trimble Smith

39. "Gray Brothers," Camp Mowgli
Charcoal
Jim Van Schaik

40. "Big Snow of '69"
Etching
New Hampton School

41. "Archie's and Lutie's Place"
Etching
Jim Van Schaik

42. "Squam Lakes Club, Holderness"
Charcoal, 1968
Katherine Dawson

43. "Log Cabin," The Hemlocks Camp
Oil
Jon and Meg Rand

44. "Camp Meeting in the Pine Grove," The Hemlocks Camp
Oil
Jon and Meg Rand

45. "The Cottage," The Hemlocks Camp
Oil, 1955
Jon and Meg Rand

46. Daniel Smith Tavern
Pencil, 1963
New Hampton School

47. "Village Church"
Watercolor, 1960
New Hampton School

48. "Village Church"
Etching
Larry and Patty Blood

49. "Village Church"
Charcoal
New Hampton Community Church

50. "Self Portrait"
Oil
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

51. "Captain Storm"
Etching
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

52. "San Francisco Bay"
Watercolor, 1960
Edwin and Maxine Wolston

53. "Winter Landscape"
Watercolor
Pete and Ellen Hoyt

54. "Before the Wind"
Oil
T. Holmes and Norma Jean Moore

55. "America's First on North American Street"
Etching, 1931
New Hampton School

56. "Gristmill, Sudbury"
Etching
Rudd Trimble Kenvin and Joan Trimble Smith

57. "Franconia Notch"
Etching
Judy Sterndale

58. "Banks of the Pemigewasset"
Etching
Anne Vohr

59. "San Francisco Chinatown"
Etching, 1928
Dr. Thomas H. Moore, Jr.

60. "Yosemite Horses in the Valley"
Block Print, 1961
Drs. Robert and Carole Billin

61. "Making Maple Syrup"
Etching
Rudd Trimble Kenvin and Joan Trimble Smith

62. "Pat and I Go A'chopping"
Etching, 1948
New Hampton School

63. "Home for Christmas"
Etching
Rudd Trimble Kenvin and Joan Trimble Smith

64. "And a Little Child Shall Lead Them"
Etching, 1956
Ted and Lucy Rand

65. "Wending Upward"
Etching
Ernestine Firth

66. "Pat's Peak"
Watercolor
Judy Sterndale

67. "Children of Holland"
Block Print
Faye Clark

68. Linoleum Blocks
Chris Marshall

69. "Animals of Africa"
Block Print, 1963
New Hampton School

70. "Market Day in Holland"
Oil
New Hampton School

71. "Native American Feast"
Watercolor
New Hampton School

72. Billy Connell
Watercolor
Bill and Carole Connell

73. Christmas cards, cards, stationery, and photographs
Spanning a long friendship with
Ted and Lucy Rand, Howard and Randy Marshall
and their families

The image of Fritz Robbins that comes to mind after talking to people who knew him is of a hard working, but gentle and caring man who would have preferred living at an earlier time. He was a 19th Century person in a 20th Century life.

David Rice remembers his zest for living -- that his senses were alive to even such mundane things as the smell of a dog, the bite of an apple. He was keenly aware of everything around him. The mystery, enthusiasm, and vitality of this creative man are the qualities Dave Rice remembers -- that, and the memories of Fritz on his bicycle, a pack of art supplies on his back, venturing out to sketch. David was quick to mention that Fritz's art was no mere hobby or part-time occupation, but his life's work which he diligently pursued to the end of his life.

Frederick (Fritz) Robbins was born in Oak Park, Illinois; studied art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Francisco, California; and spent a year in the Netherlands. In 1940, at midlife, he moved to the village of Alexandria, New Hampshire, and shortly after settled in New Hampton in a small white house near the Pemigewasset River. "An ancient maple spread its branches above the roof. A block of granite formed the doorstep."

Lou Gnerre remembers him fondly as a man who loved animals, was a vegetarian because of it, and grew vegetables and mushrooms in his cellar. He recalls that Fritz lived a hard life having no central heating or plumbing -- certainly no frills like radio or TV. He lugged water from the brook in winter sometimes thawing out blocks of ice for water. Lou reminisced how Fritz once did a charcoal of him carrying his young son, Gino, on his shoulders. (Lou had walked several times with Gino to tell Fritz that his wife, Pat, couldn't come for a portrait sitting and Fritz had watched and sketched them.) Lou saw him as almost too generous. "You couldn't do a favor for Fritz that wasn't immediately reciprocated." He, too, recalls Fritz pedaling home on his bicycle with his knapsack filled with a week's supply of groceries from the local country store. He tells how, toward the end of his life, Fritz was finally convinced to move to the "Cottage" on campus (the present photo lab). However, when Fritz was discovered missing and finally located at his old homestead, he explained that the cottage was "too grand" for him.

Jinga and Bud Moore, who cared for him and became very close to him in his later years, remember the delightful programs he presented for the elementary school children, complete with elaborate Dutch costumes, from wooden shoes to a Dutch maid's hat and braids. He mimicked Dutch men and women in their dance and habits to the delight of his audiences. In keeping with the total awareness he had of his surroundings, his art mirrored portions of his life from Pennsylvania, California, the Netherlands, and rural New Hampshire.

His life was so closely bound into the life of native farmers in the area that he seemed a natural born Yankee. Despite changing times he held fast to a way of life that gradually disappeared from the American scene. He closed all but one room in his home in winter, his cooking and heating done with a cast iron black stove. He chopped wood daily, stacking it in layers and labeling it so he could tell which were the driest pieces. Picture him after a busy day, with his dog curled by the stove -- a man not satisfied with just the visual arts -- taking up his violin from the corner and playing.

He married Elsie, also a New Hampshire artist, whom he met when commissioned to make a sketch of a fireplace for a Christmas card. Elsie created wonderful apple head and other unique dolls for sale in shops and fairs of the New Hampshire League of Arts and Crafts. Many of her dolls are still on display at the Gordon-Nash Library in New Hampton. Jinga Moore describes him and Elsie as "lovely, their home -- wonderful. Fritz was 'courtly' -- a man who liked and respected women and always made you feel good." Elsie and Fritz were happily married for 15 years.

Fritz expressed his thoughts and ideas in drawings, paintings, and etchings, but his etchings in particular recorded the life of northern New England before machinery took the place of horse and oxen. "Christmas at Grandma's" shows a family coming by sleigh to celebrate the holiday -- animals and people in abundance. "A Little Child Shall Lead Them" (New Hampshire version) shows a child leading oxen.

He was a part of New Hampton School life. His work still can be seen throughout the campus. Through the Gordon Research Conferences held in the summer, he sold many of his etchings which consequently reached world-wide distribution. His printing press enabled him to reproduce his copper plate etchings. The block press he made was used to make block prints from murals he carved on masonite and printed in three and four colors. He particularly wanted to please and interest children and, with a sense of the dramatic and exotic, made large murals such as his "Animals of Africa" and "Indian Tribes of America."

Like Thoreau, he found his place with nature, but no recluse, he also enjoyed sharing himself and his art with others. The rural civilization incised on his copper plates was nearing its end when Fritz Robbins came to New Hampton, but he continued to live it out to his death in 1974 at age 83.

The Hamptonia, April 1984. Reprinted with permission of New Hampton School.