A pirate’s booty Buccaneers invade Farnsworth and Penobscot museums for summer

loading...

Mount the stairs to this summer’s exhibit at the Farnsworth Museum of Art with caution: A pirate clings to rigging above. Look again, the figure is but a skeleton, bandana around its bony neck, knife clenched in the full set of teeth hanging from its white skull. In Searsport, a few miles north, pirate flags hang from nearly every establishment in town.

Have pirates invaded the coast of Maine? This summer, it seems so, though this 21st century invasion may be more appropriate to Robin Hood than Blackbeard. The buccaneers are sharing their bounty, offering paintings, drawings, movies and history to all comers.

At the Farnsworth Museum, the focus is on art. “Pirates! From the Golden Age of American Illustration” is an exhibit of swashbuckling paintings that Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover and other turn-of-the-century illustrators created to accompany books such as Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped.” These books have stirred fantasies for a century, creating the romantic image of the pirate as a person of utmost prowess, danger and daring, the epitome of the free man – or woman, for there were many astonishing female pirates.

In Searsport, the Penobscot Marine Museum is offering a show called “Real Pyrates, Reel Pirates,” contrasting the reality of pirates with its mythic dimension. Even if you have not thought about pirates for years, even if you relegated pirate books to your kid brother while you read “Little Women” or “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” both exhibits will entrance.

What the Farnsworth is calling the golden age of American illustration was a glorious era for children, too, a time when books offered the delicious temptations of illustrations so enticing that reading would be accompanied by a constant internal debate. One side of every child longed to page ahead to see what illustration lay in store. The other side cautioned temperance, so as not to find out the plot’s twists and turns too early.

These illustrations, created as paintings on canvas or panels, milk each scene for every ounce of terror and drama. The colors are intense: Deep oceanic blues are set off by glowing sunsets or fearsome conflagrations, sometimes both. Eyes beam with evil, mouths twist with greed, knives flash, moons cast shadows and ships are ever ready to sink, if not from a pirate’s treachery, then from nature’s rogue storms.

The drama is intense. In one painting, by Pyle, captioned, “Which shall be captain?” two pirates fight to the death on a beach, wrestling with knives, angry leers on their faces. Nearby, the crew cheers them on as if watching a soccer match. In another, two figures, a man and a lady in a long red gown, have an intense tryst perched on cliffs that today no one would dream of climbing without sneakers, pants and a water bottle. The caption reads, “Who are we that Heaven shall make of the old sea a flowing net?” According to Christopher Crossman, director of the Farnsworth Museum and curator of this exhibit, the two have been marooned and are but waiting for the tide to take them to their maker.

“The role of these illustrations is to grab attention and pull you into the picture,” says Crossman. “There will be someone pointing a gun, not at another person in the painting, but at the viewer. The artists know the perfect moment to illustrate, making you wonder what happened before and after.” Color, lighting and composition so engage the viewer in the drama of the story that one doesn’t have to have read the book to love the art.

Yet another generation of paintings pokes fun at this drama and our fascination with it. Most notable among these is Andrew Wyeth’s tempera painting created in 1981, featuring a skeleton dressed in pirate gear peering out over the ocean from a tower, a canon beside him. Wyeth calls his painting “Dr. Syn,” after stories of a British smuggler written by Russell Thorndike and later popularized by several movies.

The seed of the Farnsworth exhibit came last summer when Crossman was in Paris to pick up a piece the museum had loaned to the French National Maritime Museum’s show about pirates of the Caribbean. With the Farnsworth devoted to showing aspects of the Wyeth heritage, Crossman decided that a feature on pirate illustrations would be a great summer show, since Pyle taught N.C. Wyeth and a host of other pirate painters. Much of the work is borrowed from the Brandywine River Museum of Chadds Ford, Pa., and the Delaware Art Museum, both of which have extensive collections of illustrations by these 19th and early 20th century masters.

The link with the Penobscot Marine Museum came at a dinner meeting last December between Crossman and PMM director Mac Deford. “I thought it would be a great idea,” says Deford. Though the Searsport museum does not have an extensive collection of pirate artifacts, it does have an inventive curator in Ben Fuller, who is fascinated with the difference between pirate reality and pirate romance.

The subtext of both shows is this tension between myth and reality, why law-abiding folks have such a love of the dangerous outlaw. “Pirates were first romanticized by Stevenson in the late 19th century, with ‘Treasure Island,'” says Deford. “Then they were further romanticized by Wyeth and Pyle.” Pyle, adds Crossman, “invented the image of the pirate,” through the hugely popular 1921 volume, “The Book of Pirates,” which Pyle wrote and illustrated. It’s a book that once reached far, influencing even Ernest Hemingway, who wrote about the book in his short story “A Day’s Wait.”

In Crossman’s perception, the fascination with pirates reflected the cult of the individual that capitalism was becoming in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was “a culture characterized by rapacious industrialists and swashbuckling individualists like Teddy Roosevelt,” writes Crossman in an exhibition panel.

Today, there’s yet another resonance with pirates. In the introduction to the show, Crossman writes of “corporate raiders, self-dealing insider trading, hidden offshore limited partnerships.” At this time, he continues, “when contemporary piracy is rampant, it seems appropriate and, perhaps, relevant to look back at the origins of piracy in modern myth and imagination.”

Of course, sometimes one country’s pirate was another country’s idol. During the American Revolution, the British considered our privateers pirates. But the pirate cult may go even deeper. Pirates were democratic. They shared their bounty and freely elected captains, for they knew they needed leadership in battle. Did this pirate culture influence the philosophers of the American and French revolutions? Did it affect America’s anti-authoritarianism?

“Let’s just put it this way,” says Fuller. “Pirate texts were as popular in the 1700s as are Stephen King and Harry Potter today. It was an experiment that was working.”

Pirate-related events

Film series daily at the Farnsworth Museum

Monday-Friday, “Quest for Captain Kidd” (2001), 11 a.m.

Mondays, “The Black Pirate” (1926), 2:30 p.m.

Tuesdays, “Captain Blood” (1935), 2:30 p.m.

Wednesdays, “Dr. Syn” (1937), 2:30 p.m.

Thursdays, “Robin Hood” (1938), 2:30 p.m.

Fridays, “The Sea Hawk” (1940), 2:30 p.m.

Saturdays and Sundays, “Quest for Captain Kidd,” 2:30 p.m.

Pirate talks

July 13, 1 p.m., “History of Piracy” lecture by Renny Stackpole, director emeritus of the Penobscot Marine Museum, onboard the windjammer American Eagle moored at the North End Shipyard in Rockland. Reservations required. $8.

July 16, 6 p.m., “Making of ‘Quest for Captain Kidd,'” lecture by David Conover, Farnsworth Museum. $5.

Pirates Week at the Farnsworth (Aug. 4-8 for children of all ages)

10 a.m.-noon. Pirate-related activities.

2 p.m. Performances and activities including knot tying, illustrating and book-making. Passes $4, weekly, $15.

Children’s Literature Festival (Aug. 10)

Sept. 18, 7-8:30 p.m. “Pirates! The Art of the Written Word.” Professional actors read aloud pirate-related stories and reception at the reception. Students $15 and $60 for patrons.