A quarter for art

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

In these times, we need art more than ever to take us to new places. Thus it was very pleasant to learn that the U.S. Mint has chosen to create a new quarter to honor the Weir Farm National Historic Site, in Ridgefield and Wilton, Conn. It’s the first quarter to honor the visual arts.

The site commemorates American impressionist painter J. Alden Weir and other artists who stayed at the site and/or lived there, such as Childe Hassam, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Singer Sargent and John Twachtman.

Only two sites run by National Park Service are devoted to the visual arts, and they’re both in New England. The other one is the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, in Cornish, N.H., the site of famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s estate and art colony. (J.D. Salinger – the reclusive writer lived in Cornish, too.)

Studio of J. Alden Weir at the National Historic Site