In the early 1940s, Loomis faculty member Knower Mills created a portrait of Phelps House, a colonial-style clapboard residence on the Loomis campus. The painting’s yellow blaze of a budding forsythia bush, golden light reflecting in the western-facing front windows, and nascent leaves on the majestic elm trees flanking the front door suggest the artist admired the home’s relationship to its emerging landscape, with trees, grass, and flora awakened by the murmurs of spring during its golden hour. In a May 1947 letter to Head of School Nathaniel Horton Batchelder, Knower recounted a conversation with his wife, Sue, who “remember[ed] my observation every year about this time. Although the … air is a bit chilly, the advancing spring still works its magic. The first ten days of May make one of the loveliest times at Loomis.”

Knower Mills joined the faculty in 1918. That same year, the school purchased the Phelps House, its several outbuildings, and 46 tillable acres all sitting immediately adjacent to Taylor Hall and the dining hall, both of which were constructed for the school’s opening in 1914. Phelps House, probably built around 1797, had housed many generations of the Phelps family and caretakers. It anchored one of the four privately-owned farms that had been worked for more than a century in this section of Windsor known as “The Island.” The school would eventually acquire all four farms to assemble the current campus. The Hartford Courant noted in 1913 that Phelps House was “one of the beauty spots of the historic town. … The large old-fashioned house … with the stately trees in front and the green fertile meadows stretching to the Connecticut River in the rear made it a place which many liked to see.”

During the school’s ownership, two faculty residences were created in Phelps House; one in the original front of the house and another in the ell addition off the back. Knower and Sue never lived in Phelps House, but two other painters — history teacher Lou Fowles and professional artist Germaine Chéruy — would live at different times in the ell section with their families and create their own art inspired by the house.

At Loomis, Knower taught Latin, Greek, and English for 29 years and advised the Darwin Club. He was known around campus as somewhat of a Renaissance person owing to previous summers fighting western wildfires with the U.S. Forestry Service; his plein-air painting around Windsor and on summer trips during the 1920s and 1930s to what The Hartford Courant described as “congregating places of artists” in the Northeast and West; and copious verses composed at his typewriter, ranging from clever quips and honorific memorials to lyrics for the original school song, “Out of the Hearts of the Founders,” written in 1926. He served as Batchelder Hall’s first dorm head. One of his autumn landscapes hung in Batch’s common room until at least the late 1960s. Knower exhibited art in New York City and Hartford, at the Connecticut Academy of Fine Art, and in Windsor. He was one of a circle of skilled and talented avocational artists on the faculty at that time, including Lou Fowles, Bill Card, Howard Morse, and Bud Porter. Eleven of Knower’s paintings are in the Loomis Chaffee Archives collection.

By the late 1960s, major changes had taken place at the Phelps House site. The house was taken down to make way for the Katharine Brush Library. The majestic elm trees had perished earlier to Dutch Elm disease. Today, the Phelps House portrait hangs on an Archives wall in the library. It memorializes the building that once was and the magical spring that returns each year.

 

“In Hora Aurum”

A remarkable fragment of Phelps House survives. Lou Fowles, history teacher, school archivist, and resident of the house, rescued a narrow cupboard door from the rear living room before the house was demolished around 1967. Parisian trained costume designer and professional artist Germaine Rouget Chéruy, who had lived in the house prior to the Fowles family, painted the inside surface of the door some time after 1925. French teacher Joe Stookins gave a Chapel Talk in 1976 during which he shared the door’s origin story, its medieval scenes reminiscent of an illuminated manuscript, and its Latin phrase “In Hora Aurum,” which translates literally to “The Golden Hour.” By then, the panel had been hung in the Katharine Brush Library stairwell, where it remains, and hundreds of students pass by it each day.

Joe read from a letter written in 1972 by Germaine: “We used to place in the little cupboard a few art objects which we liked. ... The door was, consequently, open all the time; and that inside surface, white, livid, and empty was not in harmony with the contents of the little cupboard; therefore, it was necessary to paint something. But what? ‘Suivre le vent’ — a composition on two levels, with a thought to please me. I thought of Work, which is the life of our life; so, in the lower panel — manual labor — the blacksmith with his hammer to hit hard; in the upper panel — the work of the mind — reading while strolling in nature. In Hora Aurum, each hour has its gold, each hour has its treasure (that is, its joy). I do not know where I took this sentence of three Latin words. ... I add that I have never painted anything in oil except that little painting. Conclusion: an altogether spontaneous creation, done for me alone.”

Jinnet Fowles ’65, Lou’s daughter, remembers the small cupboard as a faculty child living in Phelps House. Her parents humorously named it the Sin Cupboard because it held alcohol, tobacco, and the boxes of lovely chocolates given to Lou during Parents Weekends. While the door was kept closed by the Fowleses, she recalls that it was opened often, especially as her brothers perfected their technique of surreptitiously draining the luscious fillings from chocolates using a toothpick and returning the empty chocolate shells to the box. They taught her to do the same. Under the gaze of the opened door’s blacksmith and reader, this mischievous sweet garnering might have been the Fowles children’s version of “In Hora Aurum.” 

Mr. Stookins urged the Chapel Talk audience to regard the painted panel as evidence of “the substantial wealth of human affection and talent and warmth and dedication that has gone into the stones of this place and continues to live on with us even now, if we open ourselves to it. To be sure, this requires a bit of curiosity and a willingness to accept the notion that people of other times can still speak to us meaningfully today.” He also mused that “the lesson ... the cupboard door offers us [is] on the persistence and durability, and hence the potential, of even the most spontaneous and personal creative act.”