The Muse
Everything that surrounds us is ephemeral, to be appreciated wholeheartedly right now, before it disappears.
Copyright Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago
If that reads like some dust-to-dust reminder about the upcoming Rapture or a bad case of the empty-box-of-Valentine’s Day-chocolates blues, please forgive me: It’s the snowflakes that put me in this philosophical frame of mind.
Copyright Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago
Copyright Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago
Copyright Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago
These vintage photomicrographs, by Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley (1866–1931), were the first works of art to tickle my imagination at last month’s American Antiques Show, a benefit for the American Folk Art Museum. They hung in the booth of veteran Chicago art dealer Carl Hammer, who, for 30 years, has been integrating the creations of self-taught artists, “outsiders,” and visionaries into the contemporary art mainstream.
The twenty 2 7/8 by 3 ½ -inch plates (the tiny size alluded to is the “micro” in photomicrographs) in the Hammer Gallery collection represented but a small fraction of the 5,381 snow crystals that Wilson A. Bentley photographed over the course of a lifetime, beginning when he was in his teens.
Copyright Jericho Historical Society
In Bentley’s neck of the woods—the farming region of Jericho, Vermont—snow accumulations of 10 feet or more is nothing unusual. Yet, instead of griping about the cold, hitting the ski slopes, or inventing the world’s first snowblower, Bentley diligently photographed, studied, and wrote about snowflakes.
“Under the microscope,” Bentley explained, in 1925, “I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”
No record, at least, until Bentley developed a method of creating one, using the camera and microscope he received as a present on his 17th birthday.
Copyright Jericho Historical Society
For the remainder of his life, in every mound of snow, Wilson A. Bentley saw countless, individual “gems, wrought by blizzards.” His work, Snow Crystals, was published in book form by McGraw-Hill, New York, in 1931, the year he died.
Almost 80 years later, Carl Hammer Gallery exhibited Bentley’s work as a celebration of “all things small and seemingly inconsequential.”
Bentley’s snowflakes remind us that the role of art is not to show how cool we are—but how human.
As the author Marie Beyon Ray more poetically phrased it: “Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a diamond in our hand, and melting like a snowflake.”
—Marjorie E. Gage, Executive Editor
