A new book from the National Museum of Bermuda tells how Canadian artist John Lyman long ago discovered the beauty of the island’s vernacular architecture. In the first in a two-part series, historian Duncan McDowall tells the story behind the book

Glance at any postcard, tourist brochure or out the window of any aircraft on final approach to Bermuda and you will immediately sense the island’s indelible aesthetic: an emerald sea corralling a verdant green landscape dotted with the white roofs and pastel walls of homes strikingly different from modernist architecture. The Bermuda stone “cottage” has come to epitomise the Bermuda way of life. Despite infringement by modern technologies and materials, Bermuda architecture today looks remarkably unaltered in its essentials from what has sheltered Bermudians over the past 300 years.

Architecture “of the people, by the people”

Bermuda thus offers one of the purest examples of vernacular architecture on the globe. Architectural historians have provided various simple definitions of vernacular habitation. For the Austrian-American writer Bernard Rudolsky, vernacular was “architecture without architects”. For Paul Oliver in Britain, it was “handed-down architecture ... buildings of the people, built by the people”. For Alabama’s Robert Gamble, the vernacular is “the architecture of habit”. At the core of all these definitions is the notion that vernacular architecture emerges spontaneously out of local needs, local materials and local skills. Think, for instance, of the domed churches and cave houses of the Greek island of Santorini or the hill towns like San Gimignano in Italy or the Navajo cliff dwellings of Arizona. These are the creations of “anonymous architects”, builders who have disappeared into the mists of time. The vernacular lacks the pretension of formal architecture inspired by alien “schools” of design and taste that may bear little relation to the social and material endowment of their adopted locale.

The colonists arriving on weather-beaten, mid-Atlantic Bermuda in the early 17th century sheltered themselves by applying their innate skills to what was readily at hand in their sparsely endowed new homeland. Initially, they crafted crude homes out of palmetto, wattle and cedar timber. But these materials were finite resources, soon embargoed by the Somers Islands Company. In 1659, for instance, the governor William Sayles bemoaned the rapid depletion of island cedar, warning that such a “greedy course” would beggar the colony’s future. Faced with this grim prospect, colonists looked to the thin-soiled ground below their feet and began to fashion their homes out of the soft aeolian limestone that it so readily yielded. The stone, made solid by aeons of wave and wind action and often described as "coral" by visitors, was plentiful, light and malleable. It also allowed Bermuda’s English-born settlers to adapt their recollections of the cottages of their native land to the climate they now confronted. Shingles sliced from stone blocks could, for instance, be secured to roofs, whitewashed and used to collect rainwater for storage in the cavity below the home from which the stone had been carved. By slanting the butt ends of those same roofs, Bermuda houses minimised the structural wallop that hurricanes frequently brought. Thus, by the 18th century, Bermuda was evolving its own unique vernacular style. Quarries dotted the landscape and men equipped with saws, donkey carts and timber rafters became the colony’s master builders.

By the 19th century, visitors to Bermuda invariably remarked on its distinctive approach to habitation. In 1886, for instance, American poet Julia Dorr wrote in her Idyl of the Summer Islands that a Bermudian “who wishes to build himself a house has but to scrape off a foot or two of the red surface soil, and lo! There lies his building material ready to his hand, or rather his saw”. Most found the result charming. On the first of his of many visits to the island, Mark Twain remarked that the “Bermuda house” possessed such a “picturesque shape and graceful contour” that “it will so fascinate you that you will keep your eyes upon it until they ache.” William Dean Howells, editor of Harper’s Magazine, shared his close friend’s esteem for the Bermuda cottage “in saffron, pink and pale blue, and everywhere, snow-white roofs”. Painters soon caught the same aesthetic virus: Winslow Homer’s 1901 canvas Inland Water — now in the Masterworks Collection — strikingly catches the play of white roof and pink walls against an ocean backdrop.

An artist in search of a new beginning

In 1913, the weekly steamer from New York brought another potential convert to the island’s beguiling architecture. Bermuda was by then adeptly pioneering its reputation as “the isles of rest”, a playground for patrician North Americans weary of the materialistic gaudiness of the Gilded Age. Twenty-seven-year-old John Goodwin Lyman arrived in Bermuda in a fragile state of mind. Scion of a Montreal family grown wealthy in the pharmaceutical trade, Lyman was an aspiring Impressionist artist, who had forsaken the family business in favour of a painter’s life. In 1910, he had returned from study with Henri Matisse in Paris eager to convert Montrealers to his Impressionist vision of life. His first exhibition, staged by the Montreal Association of Art in 1913, proved a bruising experience. The Montreal art critics, nurtured on years of pedestrian bourgeois canvases, mocked his work. Lyman, the philistines wrote, painted “like a four-year-old boy with a box of crayons”. His vision was too “futuristic”, blighted by “greens of offensive hues”.

Lyman was devastated, his confidence in his métier shattered. Where to turn next? Fate intervened. Lyman’s uncle, James Morgan, a wealthy department store owner in Montreal, had in 1913 purchased a winter home, “Southlands”, in Warwick on Bermuda’s South Shore. As the grim Montreal winter set in, Morgan beckoned Lyman and his wife, Corinne, south where they might shed their wintry depression. Like many well-heeled North Americans before them, the Lymans quickly made Bermuda their “secret garden”. And in that garden, John Lyman regained a confident orientation to life. He began painting again, reimmersing the modernist idiom with bold portraits of Corinne sprawled on a South Shore beach, along with landscapes of “Southlands” and Bermuda’s lush vegetation. As an artist, he would never turn back. Over the next half-century, Lyman would be an apostle of modernism in Canada and Europe.

But Lyman had another revelation in Bermuda. He learnt to appreciate the “old” as much as he valued the “new”. On the “Southlands” estate, he pitched in with local builders to build a small cottage, thereby observing their seemingly timeless skill in shaping limestone, cedar rafters and whitewash into a home, one organically emerging out of the local environment. This intimacy of construction sparked Lyman’s aesthetic curiosity. He brought a bicycle, a sketchbook and a Kodak camera, and set out to investigate the island’s homes. Almost immediately, he realised that this architecture was what he would come to call “bred in the bone” — rooted in the local environment and carried forward generation after generation. He began cataloguing what he saw, reinforcing it with an intensive reading of Bermuda history. The young Canadian’s ramblings soon brought invitations from homeowners to come inside for a closer appreciation of their Bermuda homes.

Once over their thresholds, Lyman discovered another tantalising aspect of the Bermuda vernacular: furniture crafted out of local and imported wood by local carpenters into tables, tallboys, bedsteads, chests, settees, cabinets and chairs. Often influenced by contemporary British and American design introduced to the island by its seafarers, Bermuda furniture nonetheless acquired a distinct Bermudian flair. Beyond the furniture, Lyman noted other adaptive features of Bermuda homes: doorways, mantels, staircases, tray ceilings and floor plans that reflected Bermuda’s unique climate and social arrangements — front rooms to impress visitors and back corridors for enslaved servants. Tray ceilings, for instance, brought a touch of imported neoclassical taste while at the same time facilitating better air circulation in a humid climate.

Lyman continued to frequent Bermuda throughout the First World War, steadily amassing an impressive inventory of sketches, photographs, historical notes and personal contacts. Out of this, Lyman transformed himself into an architectural historian. By late 1918, he had produced a thick, typescript manuscript entitled The Old Bermudas: Their Architecture, Furniture, etc. With 86 illustrations from photographs and 27 from sketches. It constituted the first systematic study of the island’s built heritage. Hitherto, Bermuda architecture had been seen, usually in passing, as primitive and quaint. Lyman now gave it lasting intrinsic worth by associating it with the social and material environment out of which it emerged as a sustaining element of Bermuda life.

Tomorrow: Part 2