Name/Title
Mountain ViewEntry/Object ID
1957.1.343Description
Oil painting showing green rolling hills in front of a forest of tall trees and hills dotted with autumn colors. The lower corner is signed, "CV GRANT 32".Type of Painting
EaselContext
Cecil V. Grant was born in Jersey City, New Jersey on July 20, 1880. He was educated at the Pingry School in Elizabeth, NJ, and after his marriage to Mary Jack they relocated to Elizabeth where their only child, Lois, was born in 1914.
Grant was a stockbroker, commuting to Wall Street in New York City each day. On weekends he was a “Hobby Painter,” and traveled to the New Jersey shore, Gloucester, Massachusetts, and in the 1920s to southern Vermont. In the late 1920s he purchased an old farmhouse between Londonderry and Peru on Rt. 11.
The farmhouse was intended to be a summer vacation home, but the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 changed all that: Cecil Grant lost his job, his life savings and even his home in Elizabeth, NJ. He moved his family to the Vermont farmhouse, struggled to make ends meet with odd jobs, and continued his painting just to keep occupied. But in the depths of the Great Depression, Grant began to win prizes for some of his paintings exhibited locally. From then until his death in March 1953 he painted over a thousand oil landscapes of Vermont, virtually all of scenes within a 30 mile radius of his Londonderry home. He painted year around, and in the summers he had what amounted to a one man show on the village green in Manchester, next to Walter Hard’s drugstore and across the street from the Equinox House hotel. In his later years he also operated The Manchester Art Gallery in what is now the Brewster Funeral Home in Manchester Center.Acquisition
Accession
1957.1Source or Donor
Rugg, Harold Goddard (1883-1957)Acquisition Method
BequestMade/Created
Artist
Grant, Cecil Vezin (1880-1953)Date made
1932Lexicon
Nomenclature 4.0
Nomenclature Primary Object Term
PaintingNomenclature Class
ArtNomenclature Category
Category 08: Communication Objects