Historical Palos: The Sculptors and Painters Who Walked the Woods

Painters Claude Buck and Felix Russmann were known in Palos Park for their hospitality amongst new talent, who were often guided through the woods by a local arts enthusiast named Sally Twigg.

According to Professor Walter Rideout, it was Russmann who pointed Old Mary’s property in 1920 after the author interrupted the painter’s morning shave. For much of his life, Russmann and successive wives lived on and around the Bartlett estate, near 88th Avenue and 123rd Street, until his death in 1962.

“He was a pretty autocratic gentleman,” Annette Friedman remembered fondly. A former neighbor, Friedman said she once watched Russmann chase a pair of mosquito abatement workers with a bee catcher after they sprayed up against his yard, near his bee colony.

“Felix was worried about his bees being killed,” she said. “It was funny to see him running after them … and hopeless. It was their job.”

But amongst the village’s living historical heirs, no artist stands taller than Lorado Taft, a renowned Midwestern sculptor who allegedly spent summers in Palos and whose daughter was instrumental in establishing the .

The exact years of Taft’s visits are unknown. Rideout’s biography of Sherwood Anderson puts Taft in Russmann’s home sometime before 1920. A biography written by his wife, Ada Bartlett Taft, makes no mention of Palos—though her family owned several pieces of property as far as New Hampshire.

Nevertheless, Bob DeNovo, , remembers seeing Taft—“a marvelous man”—at the in the late 1920s. DeNovo said his father and Taft, though they quarreled often, were friends. Taft, as well as Buck, contributed articles to the short-lived Palos Journal, an arts and culture magazine sold in Chicago and the south suburbs around that time.

Having graduated from the University of Illinois and having studied at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Taft opened a studio in Chicago in 1886. He would later contribute sculptures to the World’s Columbian Exposition and soon joined the faculty of the Chicago Art Institute, where he taught for 20 years and lectured for more than 40, as well as the University of Chicago, where a studio that bears his name remains today.

Members of the maintain that the University of Chicago, founded in 1893, came of age in Palos Park. Possibly on Taft's advice, several professors—including Donald Bond, co-founder of the Palos Historical Society—lived in the village, while others were known to take daytrips with their students. As late as the 1980s, the Women’s Athletic Association of U. of C. rented a cottage on the Bartlett estate, according to the late Geraldine DeNovo.

In 1913 Taft unveiled the “Fountain of the Great Lakes,” an allegorical sculpture considered by many critics to be his finest work. According to art historian Timothy Garvey, it’s a direct response to Daniel Burham’s complaint that sculptors often overlook the natural subjects around them. In his dedication address, Taft mixed gratitude with criticism, striking a discordant note against the city he held in such high esteem and once hoped would be “recognized in the world of beauty.”

What Chicago lacks, what all our new American cities so deplorably lack is a background. Our traditions are all before us. Our homes, our streets, our lives are casual. We need something to give us greater solidarity—to put a soul into our community—to make us love this place above all others. This Art alone can do.

Residential Oasis

The creation of the Cook County Forest Preserve District in the early 1900s ensured that at least half of Palos would stay the way its early settlers had hoped—a milieu of hills, cliffs and creeks, as carved by the receding glaciers. But the village doesn’t owe all its success to fate. Then, as they do today, locals fought to keep it a “green belt” free from sprawl and development—or, as former Mayor Rosemary Kaptur once put it, “a serene, almost entirely residential oasis in the midst of the burgeoning southwest suburbs of Chicago.”

It hasn’t been easy. “Because large parcels of land were sold,” Geraldine DeNovo wrote, “the number of farm families dwindled and after the Second World War an onslaught of suburbanites descended upon the scene and brought about dramatic change.”

Today, the , , Palos Fine Arts and the Palos Village Players are chamberlains of the village’s artistic spirit, taking their cue, as Friedman put it, from the remaining “nature, silence and beauty.”

Even so, the question of why an active colony of famous artists no longer exists in Palos Park remains unanswered and is perhaps too culturally complex to do justice in a few words. Bob DeNovo took at a shot at it anyhow.

“They died one by one,” he said, “and nobody ever replace ‘em.”

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