A Claremont costume carries a century of art history

By Tom Whitfield

A 1950s–60s hand-sewn outfit from the wardrobe sale that raised $15,000 for the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art will appear next weekend in The Sound of Music at Claremont United Church of Christ.

The Youth Theatre Works production premieres at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 13, and Saturday, November 14. Mika Searight takes the stage as Maria Rainer. Her olive-green-and-cream skirt has a folk-art pattern; the hand-sewn bolero jacket carries a colorful floral-and-bird motif.

The piece came from the collection of the late CLMA founding President Marguerite McIntosh. Claremont resident Mahlea Jones, Nadine Darrow’s granddaughter, saw the outfit at the September sale and bought it. “I think the first thing I said was, ‘I’m so glad you’re the one who bought it,’ because I felt like it was going into hands that appreciate it,” Marguerite’s daughter Catherine McIntosh said. Catherine is also a longtime CLMA board member.

Marguerite was born in Paris, came from a family of accomplished French artists, and died last November at 100. She emigrated to the United States in 1949 on a Fulbright Fellowship to attend Pomona College. There she met the acclaimed ceramicist Harrison McIntosh, whom she married in 1952. Harrison died in 2016; the Louvre, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and CUCC hold his work.

Catherine inherited many of her mother’s belongings, including the clothing collection. “I’d probably say over 10,000 items, because there were like at least 1,000 scarves,” McIntosh said. “And it was probably 500 belts, 500 pairs of shoes. So it was kind of an overwhelming task for me to take on. And I didn’t really know what was valuable and what wasn’t.”

Vintage clothing expert Lizz Eckert Adams, owner of The Revised Closet, spent five months sorting, cataloguing, and pricing the collection for the benefit sale. The $15,000 raised went to CLMA.

The garment’s history reaches further back through Nadine Gunderson Darrow, Marguerite’s close friend. Legendary Claremont artist Millard Sheets recruited Darrow to Scripps College in the late 1930s, after visiting the art class she attended at Pasadena City College.

She later introduced her husband, artist and future longtime Courier cartoonist Paul Darrow, to Sheets. Sheets became his mentor and later hired him to head Scripps’s art department. Paul died in 2019; Nadine died in 1996. Their four children all turned to art.

• Joan, a painter and photographer, worked for the Courier in the late 1960s. She married the late Claremont musician and songwriter David Lindley, who collaborated with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Jackson Browne.
• Chris Darrow, their son and Jones’s uncle, was a musician, songwriter, photographer, record producer, and artist. He achieved global reach and was an early bandmate of Lindley’s.
• Elizabeth, Jones’s mother, is a singer and songwriter.
• Eric Darrow, the youngest of Paul and Nadine’s children, is a ceramist.

“Growing up I went to his biannual shows with Kathryn Hermann, which took place in the Lindley’s front yard,” Jones said.

The McIntosh and Darrow families built careers in the emerging modern art of the mid-1940s and the music scenes of the 1960s and early 1970s. They were contemporaries of Sheets, Jean and Arthur Ames, Sam Maloof, Betty Davenport Ford, Phil Dike, and Douglas McClellan. Works by Harrison McIntosh, Paul Darrow, Chris Darrow, and those contemporaries form part of CUCC’s art and architecture.

“Nadine and my mother were good friends for years,” McIntosh said. “My mother used to send her postcards. Mahlea can tell you more about that.”

The trail runs through Jones’s Rembrandt Club presentation. She and McIntosh discussed the family history and a postcard from Paris that Marguerite had sent to Nadine. Its postscript read: “The red dress was perfect in Italy.”

“And I found two other postcards and I just was really tickled. I just loved Marguerite’s sincerity and bringing my grandmother into the life of these clothes,” Jones said. Another card, sent from Quebec, said: “I’m wearing nothing but pants due to the weather,” with an exclamation point.

Jones added: “And I just thought that was great too … And then another one I really loved, she was in Japan and she said, ‘Thinking of you when I see those rolls of gorgeous kimono silk fabrics.’”

For Jones, the clothes also help her know Nadine before the onset of illness. “My grandmother developed Alzheimer’s at an early, early age, and so I feel like this is a way of me understanding her and knowing her before that,” she said. “And so I really hold on and cling on to these kinds of things because of that desire to know