Home improvement Portland Museum of Art reopens historic McLellan House after renovations

When you go to a museum, you have certain expectations. Paintings on the wall. A sculpture or two. Photographs. And at least one piece that confuses you entirely.

But what if you went to a museum and the walls were unfilled and the rooms were hollow? What would you look at? How would you feel if all you saw was wallpaper, carpeting, woodworking and fireplaces?

The Portland Museum of Art charted new territory in answering those questions last weekend at the reopening of the historic McLellan House, a three-story Federal-era home that Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, a philanthropist, literary critic and novelist, bequeathed to the Portland Society of Art in 1908.

Here, it’s useful to review a handful of notes on local history. Only a few years before Margaret Sweat died, the society had been founded during a booming local arts scene to which Sweat had become attached – so much so that she left the house and its contents as a preservation project and she left funds to build an art gallery in memory of her husband, Col. Lorenzo de Medici Sweat.

The second building, a Beaux Arts museum, was built adjoining the house in 1911 and became the first Portland Museum of Art.

Some 70 years later, both buildings were overshadowed in prominence when the post-modernist Charles Shipman Payson Wing was opened in 1983. More than any other building in the bustling downtown center, the Payson Wing, designed by Henry Nichols Cobb of the renowned offices of I. M. Pei, has come to define Portland as a thriving urban community in northern New England. When the architecturally acclaimed brick building opened, the Sweat Memorial Galleries and the McLellan House essentially closed for business.

About 10 years later, Daniel O’Leary, museum director, arrived in Portland. One of his tasks as the new director was to develop the bulky, underutilized buildings on the museum property.

“I would walk to work up Spring Street that first winter and see those two buildings that were closed and that were draining funds out of the operating budget but not giving anything back,” said O’Leary. “I never thought the buildings were an albatross, but they were very, very challenging.”

Like all true challenges, however, the buildings eventually proved to be a unique opportunity in the museum’s history and in both its curatorial and educational missions.

Which brings us back to the original questions about empty museums. While the Sweat Memorial Galleries, which has also undergone extensive renovations, has been designated as the display area for the museum’s substantial and respectable permanent collection of 19th century American art, most of the McLellan House, which has been meticulously and lusciously restored with period wallpaper, carpets, floor cloths and woodworking, will remain empty – except for a formal dining room available for public events and a museum board room on the third floor. The cost for the two-year renovation and construction of both structures was $13.5 million.

Proponents of the project argue that the building itself – with a central flying staircase, soaring ceilings and decorative embellishments – belongs to the overall museum collection. Part of what informs that decision are difficulties with installing an adequate security system and museum-standard climate control in the McLellan House. Those may come later, but in the meantime, the house stands on its own as a testament to history and design, as well as a venue for public and private functions, such as wedding, cocktail parties and other events.

The focus for the museum, however, is how the three buildings are now a grand installation unto themselves, with cultural, architectural and artistic time travel as the organizing principles. Because the Payson Wing, the Sweat Memorial Galleries and the McLellan House are physically connected by hallways, they represent a tidy timeline that leads from Portland’s current arts boom (represented by the Payson Wing) to the birth of an American art style (represented in the Sweat Memorial Galleries) to the city’s Golden Age of shipping magnates, one of whom was Major Hugh McLellan, who built the foursquare mansion in 1801.

“We’ve set it up as an empty house with the building itself as a site of interpretation,” said Jessica Nicoll, chief curator at the museum and one of the leaders of the project. “It’s a great experience to be in this historic space, which is a remarkably intact example of Federal Era architecture.”

Nicoll, whose specialty is 19th century American art, is equally invested in the Sweat Memorial Galleries, which house the museum’s collection from that period, including an entire gallery devoted to the works of Winslow Homer. While the Homer room is sure to be a drawing card, the additional galleries display an impressive collection of portraits, still lifes, statues, glassware, furniture and decorative arts that mark both the riches of Portland’s past and the legacy of an earlier and thriving American culture. Frederic Edwin Church, John Singer Sargent, Frank Benson, Fitz Hugh Lane, Anna Eliza Hardy and Albert Bierstadt are featured artists, and, tucked among the rest of the collection, take the viewer down a intriguing path of American art history.

The octagonal rooms, newly painted with deep shades of tomato, plum, taupe and slate blue set off with vaulted ceilings and diffuse light, pay homage to the Beaux Arts style of museums that was popular during the early 19th century.

Nicoll did the research that yielded interior designs thought to be similar to what the McLellans would have chosen in the first year of the 19th century. She was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the craftsmen needed for the restoration were already living in Maine. Indeed, one of the points of pride for the historically accurate restoration of both the Sweat and McLellan structures is that they drew largely on in-state resources, from the museum workers to the craftspeople and historical consultants.

Whether they were hand-sewing the woolen carpets or repairing window panes, the workers felt a particular sense of pride and accomplishment, several said.

“What’s staggering is how the original workers rendered all the building materials from the raw earth right around Portland,” said Robert Cariddi, a master woodworker from Buckston. “I see things that other people don’t see when I am taking things apart – markings that show tremendous planning, little messages about the skills of the people who built the house. Making iron in 1800 was not an easy proposition. There were no machines and they literally had to extract iron from rock by using oak charcoal for fuel. In the McLellan house alone there are more than likely over a million nails. It took such an incredible number of hours just to produce the nails.”

Cariddi estimated that more than a million nails and more than 650,000 hand-made bricks are in the McLellan structure. The original nails his workers removed in the course of the renovations were reused in the final reconstruction, as much to maintain accuracy as to honor the workers whose sweat and expertise had gone into the house the first time around.

In the initial entry rooms of the McLellan House, visitors can discover for themselves some of the challenges faced by house builders 200 years ago through the use of interactive computers in a museum cluster for the study of culture in 19th century Maine and America. The state-of-the-art technical room is one of the few indications – along with a discreetly installed elevator – of modern life in the Sweat Memorial Galleries and McLellan House.

“We want people to be given the finest possible opportunity to revisit Portland’s great past and to understand more than ever before the way people lived and housed themselves,” said O’Leary. “This is a rare opportunity to expand how the museum works. The house, which is captivating, is simply an extension of the collection.”