Posted on Jan. 31, 2025 in New England Diary (newenglanddiary.com)

English watercolor artist Dorothy Worden does not have much of an art historical presence – an Internet search turns up only that she was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1868, and she likely met her husband, the painter William E. Osborn, when they were both members of the vibrant early 20th-Century art colony at St Ives, in Cornwall. This Worden watercolor turned up for sale at the Acushnet River Antiques Mall, in New Bedford, priced at $45.

Given the sparseness of details of Worden’s life, we know nothing of any trips that she might have made to the United States. This scene, nevertheless, is indubitably rural New England, a village in the Berkshires or Vermont. And the watercolor is an unusual but clearly a very heartfelt note of gratitude. “Great Blessings … I am well, Thanks to you, and hope for an exhibition this coming year.”

Who was the Dr. Constantine, the dedicatee of the pastoral picture? The tone suggests that he was more than an emergency room doctor, maybe a psychiatrist, perhaps at one of the private clinics tucked in the hills of western New England, such as the Austin Riggs Center, in Stockbridge, Mass.

Painted, one would guess, in the 1920s or ‘30s, where has this picture been for almost a century? Did the healing doctor treasure this expression of thanks? It survived somehow, and made it to the seemingly inevitable estate sale, and then to the antiques mall. And now it has been purchased (I did not buy it), maybe to be framed and revered, a mild sort of adoration for a forgotten English painter. Or not.

A chronicler of things architectural in New England, William Morgan is the author of Monadnock Summer: the Architectural Legacy of Dublin, New Hampshire, and The Cape Cod Cottage, which will be published in March. He’s also the author of Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States, which includes major examples of the style in New England.