By Catherine Frank

The Horace Williams House, that strange, little, yellow house that sits back from East Franklin Street as one begins to head down the hill to Durham, is headquarters for the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill.

The house is the only historic house open to the public in Chapel Hill and is a history book of architectural styles and tastes both inside and out. The house is also a working gallery.

The Preservation Society has an art committee headed by Anne Thomas and manned by people whose names are familiar to those who follow the arts in our community. Elizabeth Aralia, Artie Dixon, Peg Gignoux, Alex Hoole, Lynn Igoe, Nerys Levy, Moreton Neal, Kaola Phoenix, Susan Rosefielde and Carolyn Rugen work together to select and curate monthly exhibitions.

The adaptive reuse of this historic house as a gallery keeps new people coming in and suggests new uses for an old structure. From time to time, people question how an art program serves a preservation mission, and some may wonder whether this particular house is an apt site for a gallery.

The Horace Williams House was once described by Horace Williams’ biographer Robert Watson Winston as an “old, unsightly, rambling, uncomfortable dwelling, off in a grove by itself, without screens, telephones, bath-tubs, steam heat, or toilets, a situation (Horace) stoutly justified in the name of his inalienable rights, as a free-born man, to be individualistic and live his life in his own way.”

Winston notes that “old Horace’s” back lot was a “wilderness of tumble-down cow sheds, unscreened horse stables, and antebellum slave quarters, a breeding place for flies, mosquitoes, and other insects, and from the beginning of time, a source of friction between the neighbors.”

One of the most telling impressions of the house was written by Celia Miller Johnson, who was Horace’s housekeeper in the early 1930s. She remembered the bathroom with “plaster falling from the walls which I swept up each morning. (Very stingey man — had only four sheets for his bed).” It may seem obvious to say that old Horace lacked aesthetic (and other sorts of) sensitivity.

Johnson came to visit the house in 1972 when the Chapel Hill School Art Guild used the “unsightly dwelling” as a Designers’ House, with each room decorated by a different local decorator. She delighted in the transformation and noted that Horace Williams would have approved of funds to be used to support art programs in the schools. Even though this man had little care for the convenience of his housekeeper, for crumbling plaster, elegant linen or being in the running for yard of the month, Johnson remembered, “Mr. Williams loved Art. He saw the inner beauty in people also.”

Williams himself, in his autobiography, “The Education of Horace Williams,” tells the story of his wife, then Bertha Colton, taking him to the Metropolitan Museum early in their courtship. At one point, she took him into a room of “master portraits” and bluntly asked young Horace, “Which is the best portrait in this room?” He pointed one out, quickly and decisively, and held to his opinion even when Miss Colton noted that the critics did not agree with him. It was only when he stuck to his first decision that she told him he had chosen “the correct” painting.

Horace writes that it was many years before Bertha told him that she had been putting him to a test that day in the museum; she “knew” he intended to ask her to marry him and she also “knew (she) could not be happy with a man who had no appreciation of Art.”

If they agreed about art, Bertha reasoned, they could find a way to get along in other things. It seems that Bertha may have understood not only her husband’s taste in art, but also shared his love of probing, cryptic questions and challenging responses.

Williams wrote, “The things about my home that I prize are the pictures Mrs. Williams made. She loved her Art and did it to the end.” Mrs. Williams, however, also liked to do things her own way and had a hard time painting as other people may have wished.

Winston tells the story that Bertha set out to paint “one of the handsomest young women of the village. But her muse went back on her and refused to cooperate. Try as she might, she could not execute the painting. At length, at the appointed day, the young woman called around to get the painting and was conducted into the studio. Laughing, Mrs. Williams pointed to the easel and cried out, ‘Oh, Eleanor, my dear, I just could not paint you. I tried and I tried but failed. So I blotted it all out and have painted a snow scene.’”

Some people believe that the Horace Williams House is haunted and that past inhabitants return. As a steward of this old house, I want to think that the Williamses would approve of what goes on here. I like to think of the two of them strolling through our monthly art exhibitions and challenging one another to find the best work in the room. By using Horace and Bertha’s house as a gallery, we show that old places happily house new images and ideas, and we challenge people to examine their own ideas of inner and outer beauty.

Right now, we have a vibrant exhibition of works by Sudie Rakusin titled “Celebrating the Feminine Divine.” Rakusin creates images of saints and goddesses who exude inner and outer beauty. She told me that some unthinking critics have called her women ugly, because they “violate” the standard image of outer beauty. Some of them have big feet and hands and long muscular necks; apparently some people lack the philosophical understanding to see the inner beauty of strength and the wisdom of experience.

I suspect that Bertha’s muse might come back to her and that she might draw inspiration from Sudie’s own portrait of “Sankt Snoä, Sweedish Saint of Snow,” who, Sudie writes, “inspires us to welcome winter’s purity and solitude, and to use this time of rest to rejuvenate our minds, bodies, and spirits.”

Next month, we will showcase the work of Ann Ehringhaus, whose exhibition of photographs is titled “Seeing in the Dark: Visions of Pain and Healing.” The work arose from an interfaith mediation retreat in Auschwitz, Poland, where Ehringhaus met descendants of those who had been on different sides in the war and who continue to live with its effects.

The exhibition will also include the photographs of Robert Vance, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who writes that he “taught in the department of philosophy for 35 years (but far fewer than Horace Williams’ tenure!).” Vance is a faculty leader for the Aesthetics in Society program. In his artist’s statement, Vance writes that he is “interested in the gap between what a photograph records and what it can enable us to see.” I expect that if Bertha and Horace really do return to this house that they can’t wait for this exhibition!