ABOUT CABOT LYFORD
Lyford was born in Sayre, Pennsylvania on May 22, 1925, the second of four children to Frederic and Eleanor (Cabot) Lyford. Frederic Lyford was an engineer, businessman and banker. Eleanor Lyford was a member of the Cabot Family from Boston. Eleanor was an amateur painter who encouraged her son’s artistic pursuits and actively participated in his early training in drawing and watercolor painting. Cabot Lyford lived the first years of his life in Waverly, New York and subsequently in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania and Scarsdale, New York.
Early drawing by Cabot Lyford. Cabot Lyford would draw botanical images with his mother — Eleanor Lyford.
CABOT LYFORD. Cebu Laundry. Circa 1940s. Mixed Media. Completed while Lyford was in Cebu City, Philippines serving in the U.S. Army during World War II.
Following graduation from Scarsdale High School in 1942, Cabot Lyford attended Cornell University to study architecture but left to enlist in World War II. Lyford served as a combat rifleman, runner and scout with the 96th Infantry Division during the battle of Leyte in the Philippines. He was transferred to the Army Signal Corps in early 1945 as a draftsman and was stationed in Cebu City for the remainder of the war. After witnessing first-hand war's ugliness and brutality, Cabot Lyford was committed not only to the peaceful resolution of global conflict but also filling the world with beautiful things.
Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Cabot Lyford.
Cabot Lyford received a Master of Fine Arts in 1950 from Cornell University after completing a summer artists residency in 1947 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The founding and development of the Skowhegan in 1946 was deeply connected to the explosive energy that characterized post-war American culture. The school was intended to develop artists by offering an honest, supportive forum for divergent viewpoints. After college, Cabot Lyford relocated to New York City, where he wrote, directed and produced television commercials for the advertising agency — J. Walter Thompson — and NBC.
Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Cabot Lyford worked in broadcasting at ABC, NBC and PBS. Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Cabot Lyford.
Lyford began his career at NBC after training as an apprentice in the animation department and working as an electrician, stagehand, camera man on 16mm and 35mm cameras on location and in the studio, and eventually as an assistant director working on a number of feature length documentary motion pictures. Next Lyford was a story editor for Robert Montgomery Presents and began producing and directing programming through J. Walter Thompson for ABC, Ford Motor Company, Kraft Theatre, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis’ “March of Dimes” campaign, NBC and Pond’s Theatre.
CABOT LYFORD. Mother and Child. Circa 1960s. Watercolor.
Cabot Lyford produced content for Home, NBC’s hour-long daytime magazine program oriented toward women airing from 1954-57 making Arlene Francis a pioneer for women on television, one of the first to host a program that was not musical or dramatic in nature. Each hour-long show presented short entertaining or informational segments on topics related to homemaking: civic, cultural and social issues; family relations and child psychology; fashion and beauty; food; gardening and home repairs; health; interior decorating; and interviews with newsmakers.
Twelve (12) minutes of each broadcast was devoted to the promotion of consumer goods from the show's sponsors. These commercials often took place within the informational segments of the show itself. Instead of imitating the look of an actual house as cooking shows did, Home's producers used a modern television studio. The revolving set had a kitchen, a workshop and an area to demonstrate the effects of weather on the sponsors' products. A garden area contained soil samples from each of the United States and Washington DC.
Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Cabot Lyford.
Cabot Lyford created educational television programing at WGBH-TV, Boston’s PBS affiliate, from 1957-1959: an art series, children’s programing, a typing series and more. WGBH-TV in Boston was at the forefront of a variety of different types of educational programming in the years before the establishment of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in 1969. Local Boston public broadcasting series, such as Julia Child’s The French Chef, went on to become PBS mainstays. Among the programs produced in Boston at WGBH-TV was an educational series — Invitation to Art — a remote production directed by Cabot Lyford filmed at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Lyford created programming hosted by Brian O’Doherty, Bartlett Hayes and Ture Bengtz at the museum in the late 1950s.
Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Cabot Lyford.
At that time despite the technical limitations of black and white, low-resolution broadcasting on small television screens there was intense interest in using the relatively new medium of television to deliver education to the masses and bring museum collections to audiences who might never set foot within an institution’s brick and mortar confines. Lyford was Program Manager when WENH-TV in Durham, New Hampshire, now New Hampshire Public Television, launched in the early 1960s. While living in Durham, Lyford began sculpting on a larger scale.
Cabot Lyford teaching at Philips Exeter Academy. Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Cabot Lyford.
Cabot Lyford transitioned from television to classroom teaching in 1963 and served as the Director of the Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset, Maine that summer. Lyford taught art history and sculpture at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for twenty-three (23) years. During his tenure, Cabot Lyford became head of the Academy’s art department and the Director for the Lamont Gallery. Lyford and his family spent summers in Bristol, Maine — his wife’s hometown . Cabot Lyford established sculpting studios in Maine and New Hampshire once he began instructing at Philips Exeter Academy. During the academic year, Lyford worked out of his New Hampshire studio and in the summer, he carved sculptures in his Maine studio and painted watercolors outdoors.
With more studio space for large scale, monumental public works Lyford created a sculpture of large wooden geese for the top of New Hampshire’s Mount Sunapee State Park and Ski Area in the early in 1960s. The following decade Lyford completed public art commissions in Prescott Park, Four Tree Island and the USS Albacore Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in honor of the United States of America Bi-Centennial Celebration. In the 1980s Life Force was installed in Portland, Maine. New Horizons was installed in Berwick, Maine in the beginning of the 1990s. The National Academy of Design honored Cabot Lyford for his black granite sculpture — Basic Black — a direct carved woman’s torso in 1990.
CABOT LYFORD. My Mother, The Wind. 1975. Australian Dark Gray Granite Stone. Four Tree Island, New Hampshire. Photographs courtesy of the Estate of Cabot Lyford.
CABOT LYFORD. Life Force. 1983. Deer Isle Granite Stone. Located outside the Regency Hotel and Spa in Portland, Maine. Photograph by Rachel Walls.
Cabot Lyford’s works are in the permanent collections of the Colby College Art Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Portland Museum of Art, Portland International Jetport, Regency Hotel and Spa in Portland, Maine Audubon in Falmouth, Vivian E. Hussey Primary School in Berwick, all in Maine; the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford and at Ocean Spray Cranberries in Plymouth, all in Massachusetts; Christ Episcopal Church and the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, New Hampshire and Four Tree Island, Prescott Park, Great Bay Community College and the USS Albacore Museum, all in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas and the Hunter Museum of American Art in Tennessee.
Joan and Cabot Lyford with two of three children in Maine. Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Cabot Lyford.
Cabot Lyford and his wife, Joan, moved to their summer home in Bristol, Maine year-round after he retired from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1986. Cabot Lyford continued to sculpt into his late 80s but suffered from arthritis and vision loss. Eventually the physical demands of carving stone became too much and he, reluctantly, gave it up. Lyford continued with carving wood until, that too, was too much for his arthritic hands. Painting remained an outlet until 2014, when Joan passed. Cabot Lyford died on January 21, 2016 at age 90. Cabot Lyford is survived by his three children and their families.