Special to the Lyme Times, December 25, 2008. See Patti O'Shaughnessy's photos of Sylvia and her works of art.
Old Lyme’s Sylvia Marsh is known for her water colors of flowers and coastal life. The 96-year-old, long-standing Lyme Art Association member has never been at a loss for subject matter. Or painting canvases.
Marsh, a Brit who first came to Connecticut on the heels of the Hurricane of 1938, still retains her British citizenship. This time of year, she can be found in her kitchen, decorating hundreds of cookies.
Not your typical colored sprinkles and frosting swirls. These are hand painted masterpieces, from Impressionist style Santas, angels and Christmas trees to whimsical foxes, tropical trees and a circus elephant, all too unique and beautiful to eat.
Sugar cookie dough is rolled and cut into shapes, baked and coated with white boiled frosting that sets up into a hard patina. Kitchen plates become palettes for dabs of food coloring paste that turns into varying hues and shades as Sylvia mixes the colors or dips her fine paint brushes into water.
The tradition has gone on at least 30 years, according to Jane Marsh, Sylvia’s daughter, a local attorney, who literally is up to her elbows in cookie dough. Identical twin sister Elizabeth, who works for Companions and Homemakers, paints a few early each morning. Jane’s 21-year-old daughter, Inglis, trains home from Boston on weekends to help out, too.
“Mummy’s always given things that she’s made, little baskets of this and that to everyone. It’s become a big production in the last ten years,” said Jane, a talented cookie painter, too. The women will paint about 400 cookies this year, plus make shortbread, chocolate chip cookies, British pecan candies and brownies, assembling all in about 40 baskets for family and friends.
The Marsh family home, Windy Crest, on Old Shoreline Road, becomes its own winter artists colony as family and friends stop by to see Sylvia’s creations and help paint a few.
Still sharp as a tack, but not able to speak so quickly, Sylvia’s wit shows in a memoir she painstaking hand wrote earlier this year. Typed up, printed and bound, it includes some of her paintings and old family photos. Sylvia notes in the forward that Grace Ella Muriel Brand, Recollections was supposed to be about her mother. But it’s a rich recounting of Sylvia’s youth, as well as family history.
Sylvia, who was two years old when World War I broke out, recounts what she was told of pre-war life and her memories of post-war England as families of all classes and sizes struggled. Her mother, raised an only child by a Navy man after his young wife died of TB, had an artistic flair. She took Sylvia into the woods to paint watercolors of bluebells blooming. Sylvia’s father became an Army chaplain during the war.
Sylvia had three sisters and two brothers, was brought up in a vicarage and attended Convent schools. An invitation from the Beardsley family, owners of the 1680-built house at One Sill Lane in Old Lyme, the Peck Tavern, brought her here in 1938.
Back in England, she married Austin Beardsley. The young couple sped back to America on the Queen Mary Two in the fall of 1939. Sylvia recalls how the ship’s captain announced England had declared war on Germany. The ship stalled in thick fog on the Grand Banks. Despite glimpses of destroyers, nothing was said about the Royal Navy escort. The Germans had torpedoed a slower passenger ship on a similar crossing.
In Old Lyme, Sylvia met Harry Hoffman, Will Howe Foote and other members of the Old Lyme Art Colony. She had two sons, Peter and Tim, but the marriage ended.
In 1950, Sylvia married E. Lea Marsh, a prominent lawyer. They set up family life at Pioneer Farm at Mile Creek, a working dairy farm, with her two sons, Lea’s daughter Carol and son Teddy, and had Elizabeth and Jane. The family moved to Windy Crest in 1958.
A pillar of the Old Lyme Republican Party, Marsh was elected to the Connecticut legislature in the 1930s and became House Speaker in the 1940s. He practiced law until his death in 1996. Jane joined him after graduation and continues her practice in Deep River.
Sylvia continues to paint; her 2008 paintings of clusters of apples, peaches and rose blooms have been printed as note cards by Tia Smith of Essex. This year’s Christmas card is a deep blue watercolor of bare trees outlined against a full winter moon.
“She’s a kitchen table top painter, not an easel. The scenes outside the kitchen window have been painted millions of times,” said Jane. “I have never seen my mother sit and watch television, without a pen in her hand, whatever is on her lap is covered with doodles, faces she is looking at on the television or something she has seen somewhere. She’s got a great imagination and a photographic memory.”
On a recent wintry afternoon, Sylvia mesmerized a cluster of young girls, delicately mixing colors to paint a portrait of one of them on a cookie.
Despite their beauty, Jane says the creators want people to eat the cookies.
“If you eat them, you are ensuring that we’ll be around another you to paint you another one,” she laughed. “It’s like an omen.”