It was the green that caught my eye. 

The artist's palette hung on the wall of his grand-daughters' ambling 19th-century house. Its thick dollops of oil paint — dried in place for more than 50 years — reminded me of the one piece of the artist's work that had become so familiar. I'd seen this green before, and I'd seen it in Palmer Dorm. 

Known as "Ryder Green", much to the dismay of painter Chauncey Ryder, this pigment hardly dominates the 65-inch wide, expansive landscape that hangs above the fireplace in the Palmer social room. One has to look closely at the rocky New England scene to catch a glimse of the bright dash of yellow green, a leftover of summer pasture, perhaps meant by Ryder to evoke the bittersweet moment just before autumn's grip takes hold. Collectors referred to Ryder as a "poet painter" whose canvasses "breath[e] the tenderest and purest passion." Detractors criticized his romanticism. Ryder was caught in the swell of early 20th-century changing aesthetic values. When The Loomis School selected "Sugar Maples" for the newly opened Palmer Hall and published the painting's photograph on the cover of the 1940 Alumni Bulletin, it cast a vote in the contest between Modernism and traditional values in American art.

In 1937, architect Irwin Jones '22 moved his drafting office to Hartford, took up residence on the third floor of the Loomis Headmaster's House and set to work revising the original Dana and Murphy plan for a third dormitory on the quadrangle's west side. He designed a spacious common room for Palmer Hall; at 28 by 36 feet, it was to be the largest social room at the school. The LOG reported, "Mr. Dana had intended that the room should have a colonial atmosphere." Perhaps Jones drew on this for the Colonial Revival elements: a Greek key design running under the ceiling molding and fluted pilasters suggesting robust architectural columns flanking the room's fireplace. Ryder's landscape has the same permanence of these features. The oil painting and its frame are affixed directly to the wall. Probably installed for the dorm's opening in the fall of 1938, "Sugar Maples" is the exact reverse of dry point etching created earlier by Ryder. 

New York galleries exhibited Ryder's etching and paintings. One of these, the Grand Central Art Gallery, may have brought him into a circle of artists related to The Loomis School. Evelyn Longman Batchelder and friend Ivan Olinsky exhibited there along with Guy A. Wiggins '38. Olinsky and the elder Wiggins may have known Ryder from the Old Lyme Art Colony where he painted during the summers of 1910 and 1911. In 1934, Mr. and Mrs. Batchelder visited Ryder in his Wilton, New Hampshire, summer studio, returning to Windsor with 23 small paintings to be exhibited in the school library. Five years later, The Loomis Chaffee School's art prize , awarded to Joan Poindexter '39, included an original etching by Ryder. 

Two decades before Chauncey's work appeared in Windsor, one art critic noted that Ryder "had arrived" in the American school of Tonalism (paintings recognizes by depiction of mystery and mood in landscape, expressive brushstrokes and palette of cool-toned colors). Major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art , collected his work. Ryder also received praise from the Society for Sanity in Art. Founded during the mid-1930s in opposition to Modernism in art, especially Abstract Expressionism, the SSA awarded Chancey Ryder its prestigious 1939 Founder's Prize for his "magnificent landscape, 'Asbestos Mine.'"

With architects who favored the revival of a colonial style and school founders who insured that their ancestors' colonial home would be "an ancient shrine" on the campus, it is not surprising that Ryder's more traditional landscape was chosen for the Palmer social room. A story told by Ryder's granddaughters might suggest another reason the Batchelders favored his art. On one of Ryder's painting jaunts to the White Mountains, his wife, Mary, met Jennie, a girl whose family had come on hard times, in a small village. Taken with Jennie, the Ryders returned to the hillside town the next summer and asked the girl's family if they might bring her back to New York City and provide for her in ways that her family could not afford. This they did, making a family of three: the artist, the artist's spouse and a young child. For the Ryders, Jennie helped to define a life well lived; perhaps sculptor Evelyn Longman shared this thought when she joined with Mr. B and his son to become a family.