Collections record Beta

Oil Painting - Lura Ambler Liggett (1869-1947)

2009-19-1

Oil on canvas. Full body portrait of Lura Ambler Liggett. Here she is an older woman sitting on a stone wall and there is a stone building in the background. She is wearing a green hat, a brown jacket, a purple/grey shirt, a brown skirt, and brown laced shoes. On the right, a long basket is leaning on her containing purple flowers and she has her left hand resting on the handle. On this hand, on her middle finger is a ring. Her right hand is touching a pair of gardening shears. She is shaded by trees on either side of her. The painting is signed in the lower left hand corner "A. Sheldon Pennoyer" Framed in a wooden frame painted gold. Small oval shaped brass plaque at bottom stating name of sitter and artist.

Lura Ambler Liggett built Stonecroft, a large home in Litchfield, in 1927. Stonecroft is currently used as a monastery - Lourdes Shrine. They renamed the house Montfort House.

Albert Sheldon Pennoyer was born in Oakland, California, on April 5, 1888. He studied briefly at the University of California moving to Paris in 1912 to study architecture. The following year he gave up architecture and instead took up painting and studied at the Académie Julian and Académie de la Grand Chaumiére. He returned to the United States at the onset of World War I, and served from 1917 to 1920 in the camouflage unit of the Army Corps of Engineers, and then from 1920 to 1928 in the Officers’ Reserve Corp. In 1921, Pennoyer set up a studio in New York City where he would work at regular intervals for the next thirty-eight years. Pennoyer also spent large amounts of time at his mother’s home in Litchfield, producing Connecticut landscapes in pastel and oil and multiple scenes of Litchfield, both past and present. Pennoyer served again in World War II, first with the U.S. Army Air Force and the Corps of Engineers before joining the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA, better known as the Monuments Men). Given a Leica camera, a car, and a driver, Pennoyer was involved in the repair, recovery, and documentation of cultural heritage in Italy from 1943-1945. Pennoyer assisted in the recovery and return of artwork evacuated from public collections by Italian officials and storage in safer repositories in the Tuscan countryside. His photographs document the work of the MFAA, the destruction of monuments and buildings caused by German occupation and allied bombing, and the physical and emotional toll felt by the residents.

• Pennoyer, Albert Sheldon, 1887-1957

1935

56 3/4" long x 45 3/4" wide

• canvas
• oil