James Fox-Smith
A watercolor still life of Louisiana irises painted by publisher James Fox-Smith's wife’s Great Aunt Edna.
Last month my wife’s extended family held a reunion. Upwards of 130 people took part, descending upon Woodville, Mississippi, and surrounding towns to get reacquainted, visit old homes and cemeteries, and to pore over genealogical charts to decipher which branches of the tangled thicket of Woods, Catchings, Sessions, and Whittaker family trees they were descended from. Different surnames notwithstanding, the common denominator was people who, by direct descent or marriage, could trace their lineage back to one Dr. Thomas Oswald Woods, who, sometime last century, put down roots on a decent patch of farmland straddling the border between Louisiana and Mississippi, and set about making himself at home. During ensuing generations his offspring did their share of intermarrying with other local families—enough that, when my future wife went in search a husband, she looked on the other side of the planet: an effective way to broaden the family gene pool if ever there was one.
Although the original Dr. Woods never inhabited it, the house my wife and I live in has been home to five generations of his descendants, including my wife, my mother-in-law and her sisters, and their parents and grandparents before them. As tends to happen when an old house remains in a family for generations, ours is stuck in a bit of a time warp created by sedimentary layers of art, books, furnishings, and assorted knick-knacks accumulated by dead relatives, and therefore deemed to have “sentimental value.” Impossible to throw away, these objects accumulate, gaining an aura of untouchability that renders traditional measures of value like quality, utility, and aesthetic appeal, obsolete. With each generation that elapses since the acquirer’s passing, the undiscardability deepens, until eventually each object becomes a house fixture as fundamental as its front door or foundation. At this point the object must simply be lived with. By the time four or five generations of the family have inhabited the same house, the thickening accumulation of brown furniture, amateur art, evil-smelling soft toys, chipped enameled coffeepots, and broken cuckoo clocks deemed to possess “sentimental value” gains critical mass. Eventually there’s nowhere left to sit, much less to decorate.
Whatever beneficial genetic traits my arrival might have contributed to the Woods family line, art appreciation apparently isn’t one of them. Having arrived in this country with little more than a backpack and a bicycle, I struggle to demonstrate suitable reverence for the objects that fill our house, since the sentimentality that gives them staying power recalls ancestors other than my own. Occasionally I might have been uncharitable about the paintings: local landscapes and depictions of flora and fauna by artistically-inclined forebears, none of whom—and here’s where I’ll get myself in trouble—would have given John James Audubon much of a run for his money. But what these ancestors lacked in technical expertise they made up for in output, because enough examples of the Woods family’s artistic aspirations survive for prize pieces to not only adorn walls and mantels, but to be socked away in corners and stashed beneath beds, too. My opinions about the artistic merit of these pieces mattered less than ever during the Woods Family Reunion, when relatives from branches near and distant came by to visit the “old Woods place.” When they did, many were drawn to the paintings. One—a watercolor still life of Louisiana irises painted by my wife’s Great Aunt Edna—to which I’d never paid much attention, brought one visitor almost to tears. The reason, she explained, was that she had one hanging in her home that was so similar, it could only have been painted by the same hand. That hand, it turned out, belonged to her grandmother—the same Edna Woods who, one spring day long ago, was drawn down to the bank of a farm pond to paint the irises emerging there. One and the same, united across space and time by a square of canvas, a box of paints, and the impulse to capture something lovely. What do I know about art anyway?
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
