The Northern Neck is a natural home for artists. With its flowing waterways and bucolic pastoral landscapes, as well as its interesting collection of folks, painters have no dearth of subjects at hand.
This month the Rappahannock Art League is hosting its annual Labor Day art exposition at the gallery in Kilmarnock, always an inspiring and rewarding stop through the course of the exhibit, which features paintings and sculptures by gifted artisans, most of whom are from the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula.
Among the modern artists who have made “our moated Eden,” to use the term of the late historian C. Jackson Simmons, their home, one of the foremost was Linda Byrum, who lived for many years with her husband, Fred, in White Stone, after having spent their earlier married life in Annapolis.
Linda was a native of Belhaven, North Carolina, and grew up in the historically picturesque town of Edenton. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Fine Arts Department.
She became a multi-talented artist, who used both oils and watercolors as her mediums, but her great forte was in painting portraits. She had the facility to capture a likeness when painting a subject, which she then could allow viewers to see as she had seen it before even applying the first brush stroke.
For Linda, people were the consuming interest. Although she could paint scenes from nature with equal panache, being able to depict a person accurately was her focus, a drive in which she succeeded brilliantly.
All of Linda’s portraits had their own distinctive nuances. In one, she captured the moment when a long-married couple were celebrating their anniversary. In it she showed them holding champagne glasses, the crystal of which glimmered in the sunlight juxtaposed against the calm waters of an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay in the distance.
In another pair of paintings, she added her signature touches with books and flowers in crystal vases forming the background. She always painted her portraits with the requisite incidentals to place the subject in the proper context of his or her locality, whether in the garden, the library, or on the sea. In that respect, her works not only captured the subjects who sat for them, but they also reflected intriguing facets of life in the Northern Neck.
Clothing was an important part of Linda’s portraits. She wanted her subjects to appear to be as friends in the community knew them. In one portrait, she went into minute detail to get virtually each thread of a gentleman’s vest in order, allowing for his extended arm having stretched the fabric in one direction but not the other. Each of Linda’s portraits is unique, but each also bears the strikingly recognizable traits of her lifetime at the easel.
When not painting, Linda pursued her other long held interest of playing tennis, in which she achieved widespread recognition for her formidable presence on the courts. As with painting, Linda put her all into it and excelled in competition. Together, Linda and Fred were also enthusiastic sailors who traversed the waters of the East Coast from Maine to Florida, as well as making two voyages over to Bermuda and one down the Saint Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes.
After their years in White Stone, Linda and Fred decided to move to The Villages in Florida, where she died at the age of 84 in 2020. Happily, through the numerous works of art she painted depicting people and places across our region, her presence in and her legacy to the Northern Neck abides.
