(bright piano music) - [Narrator] There is an exhibit of Tiffany glass here that explores the company's lasting influence on the region.

Discover how this painting celebrates art and local history in New London, Connecticut.

And later we'll visit a museum where old fire trucks find new life and a new purpose honoring one community's first responders.

This is Treasures Inside the Museum.

(bright piano music) (bright piano music) In 1932, the daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant founded a museum in memory of her father to promote the study and appreciation of the fine arts.

Today, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London Connecticut continues to be inspired by that family's bequest and foresight.

- There's a lot to talk about with the Lyman Allyn.

It's got all of the great works of art and the wonderful experience that you expect out of a museum in a very digestible size.

It's human scale.

It's not gigantic and difficult to wander around and think, oh my goodness, I haven't seen half of it.

In fact, if you spend a day here, you can really see much of what we have on view and I think you'll be better off for it.

(bright music) We have, you know, works from early New England, from New London back in the day when it was the deep water port of very great consequence in New England and in America, frankly, you have a huge variety of kinds of work, a variety of experiences.

(bright music) - [Narrator] The museum houses nine galleries including both permanent and changing exhibits.

Collections include works by the old masters as well as contemporary paintings and often reflect a connection to the local area.

- Part of our core mission is to celebrate art and local history here.

And the artist who painted this, a painter named Isaac Sheffield specialized in painting portraits of maritime often whaling captains and their families in this region.

And so it's a great opportunity to really think about the region's history.

And in the mid 19th century, New London was one of the most significant whaling cities in America and it was a driver of all of the economy in this region.

So this portrait is of a little boy James Francis Smith.

He's about six years old in this painting.

And he's just come back from a whaling voyage.

His father was Captain, Captain Franklin Smith of the ship Chelsea which is depicted in the background of the painting.

And he's wearing a penguin skin coat that was, you know, probably sort of made on board the ship.

And these whaling voyages often went around the world and lasted two or three years traveling to the Southern Indian Ocean.

This particular voyage took the Smith family to the Kerguelen Island, also known as Desolation Island, sort of off the coast of Australia.

And there the whaling captains and crew hunted elephant seals in addition to whales and then would travel and bring the oil and goods back to New London.

And in this time period, whaling oil was sort of the major source for lighting in America.

And it provided, it had a variety of uses before petroleum was in wide use.

So it's exciting to sort of think about how the Smith family is commemorating this moment, this voyage and this particular juncture in the young life of, we call him Jimmy Smith, and he grew up and went on to become a sailor and a captain himself.

So there are photographs of him later in life and he ran a ferry going out to Fisher's Island nearby.

But it's interesting to think about portraiture and how there are so many interesting kind of clues as to what's important, what the story is with a particular sitter in a painting, you know, to know in the background.

You know, we see the actual ship that he had just been on this long, multi-year voyage.

Another detail that's really amazing about this painting is that the dates, the logistics, this is 1837, are scratched into this still wet paint on this little detail of kind of grass here in the foreground.

And that's something that you can only see really by looking at it very close up in person.

So sometimes, you know, when you are here encountering a work of art, you can see these little details and it's just a very special experience, you know, that you wouldn't have by looking at a photo online, for example.

This is a painting that you wouldn't see in New York or in Florida.

This is very specific to New London, Connecticut.

- A work of art such as any one of these is a moment sort of frozen.

It's a result of a performance, a whole life experience of a person who's practiced working through thoughts and techniques that creates this moment of beauty or of contemplation or perhaps of challenge that allows the viewer or the listener to benefit or to at least have their minds opened up by it.

And I hope, and I believe in fact, that we all benefit in a very substantial way by going to a museum, by going to performances, by cracking open a book, by doing all of the the things that, you know, don't really necessarily, you know, economically benefit you but they benefit you deeply inside.

To me, that's, I think where my passion for doing what I do here comes from.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] From a portrait of a young boy who saw the world from a whaling ship to a series of thought-provoking photographs, this exhibit is called Where Children Sleep.

Photographer James Mollison from Venice, Italy, set out to engage an audience of 9 to 13 year olds in the lives of other children worldwide.

(gentle piano music) (bright piano music) This gilded age permanent exhibit space includes an exhibit from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Glass Collection.

The designer and glass maker had a close connection to the region.

- The dragonfly lamp on view here was designed by a woman named Clara Driscoll who was one of the preeminent designers who worked for Louis Comfort Tiffany at Tiffany Studios.

She designed some of the firm's bestselling and most beloved designs in terms of floral lamps.

She designed the dragonfly lamp here as well as a daffodil lamp, the peony lamp and some other really beautiful naturalistic examples of lamps that evoke the natural world.

(light music) Here you can see ours has a lot of greenish glass.

These lamps were produced according to a pattern but they all are unique in terms of the colors and the types of opalescent glass that are selected that comprise each individual lamp.

And as you're looking at it closely, you can see there are more three dimensional glass jewels that are part of this lamp that really give it a kind of vibrant three dimensionality in a kind of amber color and green that evokes a sense of these dragonflies flying over cattails in a marsh or an environment like that.

And even these sort of turquoise eyes that pop out on the dragonflies themselves are very eye-catching and evocative.

It is a lamp that we're excited to have as one of a number of examples of this art form that were really prized and beloved when they were produced.

This lamp is from around 1906 and they are valued by collectors and visitors today for just their beauty and for the amazing craftsmanship and the innovations in glass that Tiffany Studios is known for.

(light piano music) - [Narrator] Treasures like these lamps might have been used in homes whereas other larger examples of Tiffany glass allowed light into houses of worship.

This stained glass window was saved from a local church in the community.

- I feel that it was very, very important to be able to, you know, do something very proactively and save this piece of cultural heritage for the people in New London.

And by the way, I feel it's a very important thing to put a stained glass window in a museum because normally with stained windows in a church are quite a distance away so you can't really see them up close and personal.

But here you can get right up, you know, several inches and really see the amazing craftsmanship that the Tiffany company put into these wonderful windows.

I mean, it's one thing to see it at a distance and that's when you get to see the artistic creation as a whole.

But the details, the way the glass is crafted, you know, down at the very bottom here is some very special glass that he created called Confetti Glass which has got little chips of different colors embedded in it.

And there's several layers of glass usually in Tiffany windows.

So it's quite a treat to be able to see it up close as a work of art not just as a item of liturgical setting.

(gentle piano music) - [Narrator] After years of use, two other stained glass windows in the collection needed some TLC.

Restoration and conservation are an ongoing part of the behind the scenes work at the museum.

- These two windows, smaller windows here, come from New London Cedar Grove Cemetery and they were originally in the mausoleum that belonged to Frank Loomis Palmer and his family.

The window on the left had been stolen from the mausoleum in the early 1990s, and then St. Cecilia was taken out as well for safekeeping.

And these two windows were stored in the cemetery grounds in sort of not great conditions for many years, for 35 or so years.

But when it came to light that we were getting ready to open this exhibition, someone from the cemetery reached out to Sam, our director to let us know that these were in storage and that they were something we could include in this exhibit if we restored them.

So we were in contact with an amazing glass conservator and he took these windows back to his New York studio and did some work.

The Saint Cecilia window was in fairly good shape.

She is the patron saint of music and she's shown here in this amazing kind of nimbus of clouds and light, you know, kind of ascending heaven word with her portable organ here.

And so parts of the glass around the organ had been broken and had a kind of awkward line of letting where they had been repaired.

There had been this kind of past repair.

So he redid those lines and sort of returned it to the clean lines and look, the way the original Tiffany Studios designers had intended.

And it's lovely.

I mean, you can sort of see most of the windows that Tiffany Studios produced use the intrinsic qualities of the glass itself to give this richness of color and texture to the things being represented.

But then they innovated and created specific types of glass to create some effects in a more evocative way so the hands and the face are painted and then fired into, you know, so sort of baked into the glass.

And there is a acid etching technique that's used to create the details and the designs on her belt and on the the organ.

Often the clothing that the figures wear in these windows is made up of drapery glass.

So it's glass that is kind of shifted or shaken maybe while it's cooling so that it has ripples in it to evoke the look of, you know, fabric and folds and drapery.

So some of that is visible as well in the clothing that she wears.

But you can see just the kind of beautiful, multicolored, opalescent quality of these clouds, these little stars in the sky behind her that are very beautiful.

(light playful music) - [Narrator] Behind the scenes is a hidden room, full of pieces waiting to inspire future exhibits.

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum has a collection of more than 17,000 objects from all over the world.

This is where the staff stores and organizes rare artifacts and priceless items.

The treasures here include period furniture, glass, porcelain, and decorative arts.

This is also where paintings and prints not currently on display are kept for safekeeping until they are prepared to go on exhibit.

- This is a self-portrait by the artist Barkley L. Hendricks that is derived from a larger painting called Icon for My Man Superman, in parenthesis Superman Never Saved Any Black People.

(light music) Barkley L. Hendricks is a extremely important American artist who revolutionized and made incredible advancements to American portraiture in the 1970s, focusing specifically on portraits of black Americans giving everyday people who lived often in New London, Connecticut these portraits in the grand manner with elements derived from the old masters.

This piece was a gift to us from the artist's widow.

And it is an example of, you know, much of our collection which has come in from gifts from the community.

And it's great when we can have a special exhibition that is built, you know, with sort of nuggets like this from our own collection that we then augment with loans from elsewhere.

- Preservation of our cultural heritage is something that the museum is all about.

I mean, we really take that responsibility and privilege very, very seriously.

- I love, you know, the importance of the stories behind these things to families and communities and it's exciting to be able to be a steward for that and continue to act as caretakers with our collection.

(bright music) (bright guitar music) - [Narrator] Stop by this garage on any given Saturday morning and you're likely to find some serious restoration going on.

- [Man] Go ahead, try that.

- Volunteers at the East Greenwich Veteran Fireman's Museum are busy working on their oldest truck hoping to have it ready for an upcoming parade.

- This is a 1931 Ahrens-Fox ladder truck recently acquired by our museum.

It originally came from the town of East Greenwich in 1931.

- And it would go to building fires where they would put the ladders up.

They would respond to a lot of brush fires because it also had a water tank and a pump which was rear back then.

- And we had it until 1958.

It was sold off to Department of Connecticut.

- [Narrator] But when that Connecticut department no longer had a place to keep it, the rear truck found its way back to the museum.

- The really special thing about this truck was it was built on a school bus chassis.

- It also had what they call the chimney hook.

And after a fire, a lot of times the last thing that would be standing would be the chimney and they would put this huge hook up on top of the chimney and pull it down because it had lost its integrity from the heat of the fire.

And that's where you got the term hook and ladder.

- [Narrator] Getting these trucks looking good is not enough.

Volunteers want to see them running again.

- Right now we're only getting spark on one set of spark plugs.

- And needs a little TLC.

- It's been sitting all winter.

We've had issue with a carburettor.

- [James] And I love working on the old things because you can fix things.

- [Narrator] The team here has invested hours restoring the old truck: sanding and painting, fine-tuning the engine, and outfitting it with as much original equipment as they can.

The goal is to make it a part of the larger fleet that comes out for parades and special occasions in the community.

- [James] We've got five trucks here and it's a work in progress.

We're all the time, they're never perfect.

There's always something to be done.

- [Jon] These are the trucks that everybody had a lot of pride in.

- You know, we're all big kids.

We like firetruck, kids love fire trucks.

Old guys like firetruck.

So that's why we're here.

(bright music) - [Narrator] In a second building, the museum houses its collection of artifacts and equipment used to fight fires in days gone by.

- These different cabinets are set up for the different types of things that we've been able to collect over the years.

This one in particular is fire suppression and fire extinguishers that were used in different types of manufacturing or in homes.

But it shows off the innovative techniques that people used to suppress fire over the years.

Going way back, your insurance company would issue you one of these and you would keep it at your home.

And in case of a fire, your job was either to go to the fire with their bucket or give it to somebody else.

And the bucket was used to fill up the trucks at the scene of the fire.

If people didn't just throw the water on the fire they would put the water into the fire truck and the truck would pump the water out and then they, each home would display one of the markers that the insurance companies would issue to the homeowners.

This one happens to be from Farmers but it's a good example of how people would display that their houses were indeed insured.

So when their house was on fire the firemen would come and put the fire out.

(bright music) - Years ago this we're talking the 1700s and this is what you fought fires with.

- [Narrator] Leigh Johnson knows the equipment better than most.

The retired East Greenwich firefighter is now the museum curator.

- This is a, well this was pretty basic.

You would pull it along until you got to a hydrant, okay?

They would take this off, take the ports off the hydrant and attach it to here.

And if you look, this is what they call flaking the hose in the back.

As you pull this towards the fire, the hose came out, all right?

In the meantime, you've got somebody who is gonna open the hydrant for you and when you got to the end, you would put a nozzle on it and the guy opens the hydrant and you fight the fire.

That's the basic thing of this whole thing.

They call it a hose wagon.

- [Narrator] The history here covers more than a couple of centuries.

In the late 1800s, fire safety took a giant leap forward when a new alarm system started showing up around the country.

- One of the best memories that I have as a volunteer fireman was the alarms going off and the horns going off on the roof of the building.

And one of the best examples is the Gamewell Fire Alarm systems.

Early 1900s, the Gamewell Company started installing these fire alarm boxes on street corners throughout the country.

And in East Greenwich we had a Gamewell Fire Alarm system.

This box can open up and we can show folks who come through the museum how this device works.

It's like a clock.

Once you set it off, the wheel spins and it sends out the signal that goes into the fire station and the fireman will pick up a run card and look at the number of alarms that have been posted on the ticker tape and it tells him where the fire is.

So this system is really ingenious for its time.

And we have a complete setup here now.

So what I'll do is I'll set off the alarm.

(bell ringing) So that's 311.

So you look, would look up 311 and find out where the fire is.

It goes for four rounds for redundancy.

The firemen would get that alarm, get in the trucks and they would go to the fire.

When they arrived at the fire, they would open the box and make sure that the box had indeed been pulled by winding it.

Okay, so because it winds that box has been activated and it doesn't require electricity to let the clock work.

So when the power goes out, the alarm system still works.

Nowadays with everyone having cell phones, these things aren't become obsolete but they are a good backup in case God forbid something would go down with a cell phone system.

- [Narrator] After months of preparation, the Ahrens-Fox ladder truck is finally up and running and stands ready to return to the streets of East Greenwich.

It'll join the other trucks in the fleet as they make their way out into the community to celebrate and honor an important part of this town's history.

- When we take these trucks out in the parades, when you're driving and you have everybody waving and clapping and cheering you on, you get the sense of appreciation.

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