The Press recently mentioned a noted artist named Ross who built the Ward Acres house. I thought he lived in Ridgebury, not in the south part of town.
Ridgefield has had two notable artists named Ross — they were not related to each other, though both came from the United Kingdom.
As a portrait artist, C. Chandler Ross painted many of the captains of industry during the first half of the 20th Century, including F. W. Woolworth of the store chain, and also produced portraits of senators, governors and presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.
“The American business executive is not the hard, crusty individual he is supposed to be,” Ross once said. “Invariably I find that he is most delightful when he drops the guard that modern business forces him to maintain during office hours.”
A native of England, he studied art in Paris and Munich, and under Anders Zorn, a Swedish master.
When not painting portraits, Chandler Ross turned to flowers, and his floral paintings were well known and often reproduced. In Ridgefield, he built the Peaceable Street house that later became the center of Ward Acres, home of philanthropist and horseman Jack Boyd Ward.
Chandler Ross died in 1952 in Sarasota, Fla., at the age of 64.
Ridgebury was home to Alexander Ross, who, especially late in his career, loved painting nature. He was “obsessed with the celebration of all the joys of nature, especially spring and summer — the profusion of wildflowers, the burst of buds into full-blown petals, the murmur of voices from the young children and young nudes lone with their thoughts in sylvan settings,” wrote art critic Martha B. Scott.
A native of Scotland, Alexander Ross was born in 1909, and came to western Pennsylvania when he was 5. He studied at Carnegie Tech and began working as a commercial artist in Pittsburgh in the 1930s.
One of his first big breaks came in 1941 when Good Housekeeping commissioned him to paint a cover, and he wound up doing 130 more covers for the magazine over the next 12 years. His work also appeared in Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s — often including some or all of his four children who early on learned to model for him.
He retired from commercial art in 1965 and began painting in a style reflecting his interest in abstract expressionism and French Impressionism, which he called “inventive realism.” “Realism and abstraction strike a dream-like balance,” said one critic of his work.
His paintings were exhibited widely and he won many awards, but his work went beyond canvases. In 1969, he designed a U.S. commemorative postage stamp marking the 100th anniversary of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. Late in life he became interested in religious art, and designed the stained glass windows for a church in Danbury and also illustrated three religious books.
Alexander Ross moved here in the 1970s and died in 1990 at the age of 81. —J.S.
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