This photograph of Barlett Hayes, Jr., second director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, was taken by Musya Sheeler (née Sokolova), while her husband, Charles, was completing what was, in fact, the first artist’s residency in the Addison’s history.

Invited by Hayes to visit Andover and possibly gather inspiration for new paintings, Sheeler spent about a month on campus in the fall of 1946, accompanied by his wife, Musya, and their dachshund, Ebony. While staying at the Andover Inn, the Sheelers were frequent dinner guests at the house of Claire and Bartlett Hayes, and quickly the two couples became close friends. The potential presence of Ebony originally seemed to pose a problem, as the Inn did not typically allow dogs; in a letter of September 9, 1946, Musya, who often acted as her husband’s agent, wrote to Hayes, “I am sorry about the difficulty over the dog. It looks as though the simplest way of getting about it would be for me to stay home.”¹ Had it not been for Hayes’s persistence—ultimately convincing the Inn management to make the Cochran apartment, with its own private entrance through the garden, available to the Sheelers—Musya would not have been able to join her husband and this photograph would not exist.

Musya’s portrait of Bart, as he was best known among colleagues and friends, captures in his countenance the tenacity of his character, a trait that the Sheelers so admired. Following her husband’s detailed account of Bart’s herculean efforts to organize an exhibition of Sheeler’s work, including a 24-hour round trip to New York in his Model A roadster to pick up a selection of Sheeler’s paintings, Musya added that Bart was an “unbelievable guy.”²

Reminiscing about his Addison residency in that same 1958 interview, Sheeler remarked: “Well, there was a place just on the edge of Andover which is old, it goes back to when New England was the great textile center, you’ve probably (seen) many places where all those places are just, I mean those textile mills are just carcasses now, the windows are out and all that sort of thing. Well, there was Ballardsdale [sic], which was adjacent to Andover, it was a place like that, and was certainly of enough interest to me to devise a picture of it, and that was the subject for one.”³

The Sheelers had a shared passion for photography—Musya a penchant for portraiture, Charles for architectural subjects. It was, in fact, through photographic studies that he developed his painted compositions, as a group of photographs of Ballardvale by Sheeler in the Addison’s collection attests. His time in Andover not only revitalized his career as a whole, but, more specifically, also resulted in a group of new paintings. Among them, the oil painting Ballardvale (1946), the tempera painting The Mill, Andover, Massachusetts (1946), and the watercolor Ballardvale Revisited(1949) can be found in the Addison’s collection.

Musya and Charles married in 1939—six years after Sheeler’s first wife, Katherine died—and together they resided in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York until Charles’s death in 1965. An integral part of Sheeler’s late career, Musya often captured her husbands in moments of casual interaction with friends, including the notable collector William Lane, who was one of Sheeler’s most important patrons. Another among the couple’s roster of prominent intellectual friends was poet William Carlos Williams, who described Musya as “a Russian of a tragic past but vigorous integrities.”⁴

Kelley Tialiou
Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Assistant | Librarian | Archivist


1. Musya Sheeler to Bartlett Hayes, September 9, 1946, “Charles Sheeler: A Survey Exhibition” exhibition file, Addison Gallery of American Art Archives.
2. Oral history interview with Charles Sheeler, December 9, 1958, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-charles-sheeler-12883.
3. Ibid.
4. William Carlos Williams, quoted in Erik Anderson Reece, A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport (New York: New Directions Books, 1996), 69.