The other day, Jeff Andersen, the director of the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, shared this painting by Miriam Barer Tamsky, who died late last year.
She painted “The Skaters” in 1943 when she was Miriam Anne Barer and a scholarship student at the Yale School of Art in Connecticut. It depicts a couple gliding across the rink at Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center.
“Painted in egg tempera, one of the most demanding media for an artist to attempt, the painting has one foot in the Italian Renaissance and the other in the imaginary world of Magic Realism,” Andersen writes. The surreal style was hot across the country in the years before New York Abstract Expressionism came to dominate American art in the late 1940s.
Barer grew up in New Haven, where she was born in 1923, the daughter of Sigmund and Mary Barer, who immigrated to this country from Russia before World War I. After graduating from Yale in 1944, she worked in Manhattan as a commercial illustrator. In 1946, she married Joseph Tamsky, who was just back from World War II, and she largely gave up her art.
Mr. Tamsky had studied architecture at Yale and urban planning at MIT. In 1940, he enlisted in the Navy ROTC and served in the Pacific during World War II, ending up stationed in Guam when the fighting was over. He proceeded to spent his entire professional career as a city planner, first in Philadelphia, then for the Connecticut towns of New Britain, Hartford, and Manchester. He retired in 1988 after serving for 17 years as planning director of Norwalk, Connecticut.
Together the couple raised three sons and a daughter in West Hartford and then in Norwalk. Miriam Tamsky worked for many years in the circulation department of the Norwalk Library and, after the couple moved to Harwich, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod in the late 1980s, she volunteered at the Brooks Free Library.
In retirement, she began making and showing paintings again as a member of the Cape Cod Art Guild. Her husband passed in 2012. She died on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017, after five years living at Victorian Assisted Living in Chatham, Mass.
Her family had already donated “The Skaters” to the Florence Griswold Museum in 2014.
“Few who see this painting ever forget it,” Anderson writes. “…Miriam got married and devoted herself to her family, largely abandoning her career as an artist, thus explaining in part why she is an unsung artist today.”