RG: In our opinion

Bermuda has long demonstrated it really does possess such stuff as dreams are made on.

The Island has served as a seemingly inexhaustible muse for writers, poets and artists over the course of more than four centuries.

Scarcely had the first-hand accounts of the Sea Venture castaways’ time in Bermuda reached London in 1610 than William Shakespeare transformed the raw material of their reportage into poetry in The Tempest, his last solo work.

That literary masterpiece appropriated everything from the endemic Bermuda cahows’ eerie night cries (which became the “noises, sounds and sweet airs” of Tempest’s unnamed isle) to the St. Elmo’s fire which danced in the foundering Sea Venture’s rigging (re-imagined as the shimmering apparition Ariel who on the “topmast, the yards and bowsprit” of a galleon plunging through perilous seas would “flame distinctly”).

The play was once described, not entirely inaccurately, “as the greatest real estate prospectus in history” debuting as it did at a time when investors were being sought to run a permanent Bermuda settlement as a private commercial venture. Far more consequentially, Shakespeare’s Tempest cemented our reputation as an enchanted island and also as a source of inspiration for some of modern history’s most creative minds.

Located as it is at the crossroads of continents, cultures and major shipping lanes, throughout its history the Island has held a significance in Atlantic affairs in exactly inverse proportion to its size. So it’s not entirely surprising that from its very earliest days Bermuda has been eagerly seized on as a subject, a setting and a symbol by those in the creative arts.

Making the eternal out of the ephemeral, translating a fleeting feeling, mood or impression into pigment or poetry or prose, has always been the hallmark of great art. And Bermuda has repeatedly demonstrated it has something of the eternal about it when refracted through the imaginations of great artists.

For Irish poet Tom Moore Bermuda was a “little fairy isle … a heaven for love to sigh in/For bards to live and saints to die in.”

Dramatists Eugene O’Neill, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan all produced plays of enduring interest here. Anthony Trollope, Jules Verne and Rudyard Kipling used Bermuda as a setting for classic stories. James Thurber was contributing locally flavoured cartoons and stories to The Bermudian magazine as a part-time Sandys resident at the same time the work which made him synonymous with sophisticated urban humour was appearing in The New Yorker. F. Scott Fitzgerald put the finishing touches to his masterpiece “Tender Is The Night” in Bermuda while vacationing here.

His wife Zelda, the archetypal flapper and an accomplished painter, novelist and dancer in her own right, also created artwork and writing of lasting value on the Island (she provided a vivid word picture of 1933 St. George’s in her diary: “Bougainvillea cascaded down the tree trunks and long stairs passed by deep mysteries taking place behind native windows. Cats slept along the balustrade and lovely children grew.”)

The final shooting script of Gone With The Wind was hammered together in St. George’s by producer David O. Selznick and writer Jo Swerling from dozens of earlier drafts (including contributions by Fitzgerald) just weeks before principal photography began on the quintessential Golden Age Hollywood classic in early 1939.

Ian Fleming and Peter Benchley put larger-than-life heroes and hissable villains through their paces in ripping adventure yarns which took place in Bermuda.

And such diverse standards as Easter Parade, Stayin’ Alive and Woman all owe more than a little to the Island’s cadences and atmosphere which songwriters Irving Berlin, the Bee Gees and John Lennon absorbed by osmosis during their stays here.

Mark Twain, perhaps Bermuda’s most celebrated artistic champion after Shakespeare, once actually compared Bermuda — then best known for its agricultural exports — to the home of the classical muses.

“They say,” he observed before embarking on one of his trips to the Island, “that the combined aroma of crushed onion and Easter lilies is like that which dilate the nostrils of the gods on Parnassus. I’m going to find out.”

It’s perhaps in the field of the visual arts that Bermuda is best known to an international audience.

An Island which puts on bright colours year-round and is renowned for the piercing clarity of its bright white light would prove to be an irresistible subject for any number of 19th and 20th century masters.

Winslow Homer’s widely reproduced Bermuda landscapes and seascapes, vigorous but subtle works, helped to define and popularise our appeal in the eyes of the world. A half-century after Homer visited Bermuda, Andrew Wyeth — who was much influenced by the earlier artist’s realist treatment of pastoral settings — made his own pilgrimage to the Island in 1952. Regarded as one of the pre-eminent American painters of the last century, just three of his Bermuda works are known to have survived. And one of them, “Royal Palms”, will soon be making its way home to join the permanent collection of the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art.

The evocative Wyeth watercolour, depicting a stretch of Shinbone Alley in St. George’s bordered by the titular palms, is a work of international cultural significance. And it’s also a painting which initiated a local cultural movement, one which continues to shape the way we view the arts, artists and our Island.

When “Royal Palms” was displayed on loan here during Heritage Month in 1986, it provided the germ of the idea for what eventually became Masterworks.

Tom Butterfield, founder and guiding spirit of the organisation, has long cited the watercolour as having prompted his two-fold mission to celebrate homegrown talent as well as to repatriate artwork from around the world inspired by Bermuda. And it’s also a piece he had long-since given up on acquiring for Masterworks given the scarcity — and prices — of Wyeth’s work.

But thanks to the generosity of a Masterworks donor, the Botanical Gardens museum will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2016 with the painting Mr. Butterfield has called his “Holy Grail” providing the new centrepiece of its 1,200 piece collection.

It brings things neatly full-circle for the custodian of Bermuda’s cultural legacy to now possess the stuff Mr. Butterfield’s dream was made on.