How did Ben and Rae get to “the farm,†as they often referred to this property? They were married six years before they found this spot. City dwellers in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street, like many New Yorkers, the Soloweys left town in the summertime. They went
North to find good climate, rustic settings, and vistas to paint. In the thirteen years that Ben lived in New York, he never painted a cityscape—at a time when every artist painted the city. For Ben, bucolic rolling fields, barnyards, and the jagged coastline of Maine were fit subjects for his landscape paintings in both oil and watercolor.
Ben and Rae began with their honeymoon in June 1930. Casco Bay, Maine must have been magical for them that summer. They had known each other for only four months. It was love at first sight, with Ben proposing on their first date. They had met two days earlier. Nevertheless, that summer laid the foundation for a solid forty eight year marriage. That stay in Maine and one the following year resulted in a number of canvases and works on paper that Ben painted en plein air. Ben also indulged his interest in photography producing a healthy stack of negatives that he would develop back in his studio.
Subsequent summers took Ben and Rae to the White
Mountains in New Hampshire, Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, Cross River, New York. Ben was at the mercy of the weather, and a good part of the summer could be lost to rain. After cutting short a stay in Pompton Lakes in 1935 after two weeks due to bad weather, they made their way to Cross River. Perhaps it ignited the idea to start looking for their own place in the country where they could go anytime. By the next summer, they had purchased this 34-acre farm.
Once here, Ben might awake and say the light’s right, let go to the Poconos and paint. Trips to see Rae’s family in Harrisburg meant painting along the
Susquehanna River. Always Ben seemed to be looking for a rendezvous with his second great love: Nature. While his landscape paintings and drawings rarely include people, trees, rocks and water provide the personality. Building seemed organic to the natural world, with old barns are old friends to the trees that surround them. Whether modernist daubs of color, or the puddling of ink, they seem as graceful and beautiful as his virtually singular figurative subject: Rae.
Ben recorded a piece of America that in many ways is already history. The lonely back road, the broken down farm, the untouched coast. In early 21st century America, these are becoming rare. In the mid 1950s he told a friend that they were were the last generation to enjoy the unspoiled environment. The American landscape for Ben Solowey was one of natural beauty. The hand of man that Ben looked for was that of the farmer. It is no wonder that Ben felt and Rae felt at home here in this farm community.
