77-Year-Old Mural By Falmouth Artist In Search Of New Home
A massive mural painted by Falmouth artist Lloyd Turner Nightingale and his wife, Adeline, needs a permanent home before it is demolished along with the building that houses it in Stoughton.
The mural, which depicts a Stoughton boy’s adventures on a whaling voyage around the world, is currently located in the Fellowship Hall of the F.C. Phillips Company building at 471 Washington Street in Stoughton. Brian Snow, of Scituate, took up the task of finding a new location for the 16-panel mural that his grandfather had commissioned back in 1944 after discovering its connections to Falmouth and its whaling history.
Mr. Snow has done his research on Mr. Nightingale but he did not have to look too much further than his family’s ties to the artist. Back in 1939 Mr. Snow’s grandfather, Fred C. Phillips, and his uncle, Frederick W. Wormelle, bought what was once Hoyt’s Boatyard and turned it into Falmouth Marine Railways. Mr. Wormelle served as the manager while Mr. Phillips was more focused on the metal manufacturing business he founded up in Stoughton, the F.C. Phillips Company.
“Freddy had the boatyard, which was started as kind of a collaboration between Freddy and my grandfather,” Mr. Snow said. “Lloyd Turner Nightingale worked as a painter at the boatyard. He was the one that was always lettering the sterns of boats with names and homeports and stuff. He was always the sign painter at the boatyard.”
Mr. Phillips later decided to build a Fellowship Hall on the Stoughton property in 1944 and when he wanted to decorate it with tasteful art, he knew exactly where to go for help: his own boatyard’s in-house painter.
“He got Lloyd Nightingale to do this painting all the way around the inside of the hall,” Mr. Snow said. “It’s probably the most major piece by Lloyd Turner Nightingale.”
Outside of the boatyard, Mr. Nightingale was a flourishing young artist in Falmouth. He published a book of sketches, “From Falmouth’s Past,” a collection of drawings published in the Enterprise, in 1936 and was known around town for painting murals in places like the Mullen-Hall School and in shops on Main Street. He was also the grandson of Charles H. Turner, a whaling captain from Falmouth, who is buried at the East End Burying Ground in East Falmouth.
The mural in question, which is made up of 16 Masonite panels that measure six feet wide and eight feet tall, tells the story of a young boy from Stoughton who travels to New Bedford in 1850 and signs up for a four-year-long whaling adventure and spends his days traveling around the world. Each of the boards has a title and describes the part of the adventure that it depicts. According to an Enterprise article from the time, the mural was worked on by Mr. Nightingale and his wife, Adeline Tabor, and finished in October of 1944. Mr. Nightingale died in 2010 at the age of 95 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he lived part-time since the 1950s.
The F.C. Phillips business in Stoughton, of which Mr. Snow was vice president, fizzled in recent years and the offices have officially closed their doors. Now that the contents have been sold to the auction house, Mr. Snow is doing all that he can to find the mural a new home before the building is scheduled for demolition, which could happen as soon as a few months from now. He said that the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, is the only group that has expressed interest, but even that lead has not really led anywhere.
“I’ve tried everybody else but it’s such a big mural,” Mr. Snow said. “It seems to be to its detriment that it’s so big; nobody can find the wall space for it. Actually, at this point, if somebody wanted part of the mural, they could have it. It’s a free thing. I’m just trying to save a mural here.”
A video that showcases the mural is available on Vimeo under the title “Stoughton Boy.” Mr. Snow said that the videographer, Robert Button of Sandwich, was brought in by the auction house because they were so intrigued by the history of the F.C. Phillips Company.
“When the videographer came, he was hired by the auction house just to document the inside of the building,” Mr. Snow said. “I was like, ‘you’re doing the inside of the factory but you’ve got to see this mural.’ So he set up his cameras and he did this long scrolling video of going all the way around the hall, everything lit up with floodlights and everything. It really came out nice.”
Mr. Snow has been working closely with Rosann Damelio of Museums on the Green to find a home for the 128-foot-long mural. He thought that Falmouth would be a great place for it because of the artist’s connections to the community but so far, none of the groups or organizations he has reached out to—a list which includes Martha’s Vineyard Bank, Falmouth Public Schools, and Museums on the Green—have jumped at the opportunity to claim the free mural, largely due to its massive size.
“I keep searching, I keep getting leads and I keep getting encouraged,” Mr. Snow. “But at this point, I’m starting to wonder.”
Anyone interested in obtaining this mural should reach out to Brian Snow via email at halyard152@gmail.com.