Sometimes the story behind a work of art takes time to unravel.  While careful research can provide useful clues, serendipity can often seal the deal.  Beatrice Cuming’s Bridge is a classic case in point.

      When we acquired the painting at auction in Connecticut in 2003, no background information accompanied it.  The only available clues were the inscriptions on the stretcher: the artist’s name, a “New London” reference and the date 1931.  The date is difficult to explain, as Cuming was then in Europe.  New London, the Connecticut city to which Cuming moved in 1934, appears on the reverse of a number of her works, usually as part of her address. But the scene depicted in the painting bears no known relationship to the industrial landscape of the New London area.  

     Further research indicated that the artist was commissioned by Standard Oil Company to paint a series of gouaches depicting company plants in Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which were reproduced in a company publication in October of 1946.  The hypothesis that our painting was somehow connected to, or inspired by, that commission, was suggested by the presence of a Socony (Standard Oil Company of New York) billboard on the right side of the composition and the oil rigs on the left.  That, therefore, remained our best guess—until recently.

     It was a series of email exchanges with Lyman Allyn Art Museum curator Tanya Pohrt in connection with her work on a 2024 Cuming retrospective that ultimately resolved the mystery.  A photograph of the painting apparently taken around the time of a previous Cuming retrospective at the Lyman Allyn in 1990 was inscribed on the back with the name of its then owner (Alma Wies) and, in a different hand, the designation “Bourne Bridge.”  The catalogue for the 1990 retrospective listed a painting under that title, with dimensions corresponding to the as-framed dimensions of our work.  Mystery solved?  Not so quickly:  topographical evidence makes it abundantly clear that our painting is not a depiction of that oft-congested span between Cape Cod and the Massachusetts mainland.  

     If it isn’t the Bourne Bridge, then what bridge is it?  Perusal of old photographs and consultation between Ms. Pohrt and collector Jonathan Sproul suggested yet another possibility: the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge in southeastern Massachusetts.   Cuming is known to have visited New Bedford on several occasions, creating several works featuring locales within the city.  Photographic and topographical evidence irrefutably ties at least one of these works to a site leading directly to the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge (see Fig. 1).   Although our work is rendered from a different vantage point and the available photographic documentation is less compelling, various features (e.g., the structural elements of the bridge, the forms of adjacent buildings, the oil derrick on the far left, the presence of trolley tracks and the style of the streetlights) allow us to conclude that our painting does, indeed, depict the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge looking eastward from the New Bedford side.

     A final discovery adds a fascinating addendum.  A newspaper clipping dated August 4, 1940 in the files of the Archives of American Art reproduces the painting above a caption referencing the work as Bridge and its exhibition as part of the American Artists Congress group exhibition at the American Art Today Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1940.  Fortunately, I was able to locate the full article in the online archives of The New York Times.  Thus, we now know its original intended title—Cuming was evidently more interested in the generic concept than precise identification—and are able to narrow its execution to a date no later than 1940.