‘Risdee’ to aficionados.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

RISD is generally ranked as the #1 art school in the US, and is located at the base of the Brown University campus. The school does not confer a degree, its minor requiring studies in history, philosophy, social sciences, English, art history or liberal arts at an accredited college for a degree to be earned. Brown, as it happens, is happy to oblige and offers a dual Brown/RISD degree in exchange for five years at the two institutions.

Whether it’s photography, film, glass, furniture, graphic design, printmaking – you name it – RISD is the place to go.

We focused our brief visit the other day on some of the art on display after a busy day touring Brown. The campus is a bit all-over-the-place with no unifying quad or sense of an architectural whole, but there were lots of fun discoveries to be made. As I would far prefer my son becomes successful and buys art, rather than make art and be economically destitute, our limited visit was just right. I cannot think of a worse way of making a living than as an artist where success is as much serendipity as skill, with a healthy dollop of talent thrown into the mix. There is simply too much competition for the profession of making art to make economic sense and the barriers to entry are near non-existent, meaning too much competition.

The concept of ‘teaching art’ is anathema to me. You can teach technique in certain subjects but you cannot teach talent to the talentless, so I always rather wonder about art schools. Given that techniques can be easily learned from a book or an app (photography being an excellent example) all that remains to be found is talent and that’s a binary equation. You either have it or you do not. It cannot be taught. Think about that next time you see 20 talentless fools, untroubled by original thought, all obediently pointing their cameras at the subject as dictated by their equally talentless ‘instructor’. Or, worse, imitating that supreme bore, Ansel Adams.

RISD alumni include James Franco, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Sam Posey (!) and many others. In no case was their talent found at school.

A lovely school in a bucolic setting.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Amherst College (the ‘h’ is silent) was founded in 1821 and is a private school with just over 1,800 students and a very low student:faculty ratio. It is not to be confused with nearby U Mass Amherst with almost 20 times the number of students but just six times the number of faculty. The Amherst College endowment is seven times that of U Mass in dollars and seventy times that of U Mass in dollars per student. Draw your own conclusions. When it comes to higher education going where the money is is generally a winning strategy.

Now it is true I am getting more than a bit tired of grey skies and lack of shadows in the snaps accompanying these pieces and, indeed, what little wan sun there was to be had when we arrived this morning promptly managed to disappear on our arrival. I sorely miss Arizona skies.

Famous Amherst alumni include Emily Dickinson, David Foster Wallace, Calvin Coolidge who perfected his non-speaking skills here, Jeffrey Wright, the estimable economist Joseph Stiglitz, Burgess Meredith and the silent comedian Teller, doubtless a fan of Coolidge’s. The list is out of all proportion to Amherst’s small size, which speaks volumes.

For images from a visit to the Mead Art Gallery at Amherst College, click here.

One of the Big Three.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Along with Princeton and Harvard, there is not a lot that can be said about Yale which has not already been committed to paper. Founded in 1701 there are 5,500 undergraduates and 6,900 postgraduates here and the university can lay claim to being the alma mater of many US presidents, including a recent one who is now likely happy to be rated the second worst, courtesy of the current incumbent.

Part of the city of New Haven in Connecticut, the campus spans an expansive 260 acres and while there is not that sense of perfect integration of the parts into a whole so evident at, say, Wesleyan or Tufts, the scale is necessarily larger here, given the five times greater number of students. In addition to the usual gamut of academic buildings, the campus includes the Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Yale Art Center, both major museums in their own right.

While we originally contemplated a weekday visit to enjoy a guided tour, the weather forecast is so bad (how does anyone survive the simply awful weather in New England?) that we toured unassisted on a Saturday and, in the event, had a wonderful time.

The Yale Art Museum:

The Museum has a superb collection, not least when it comes to Edward Hopper, five of whose best works were on display at the time of our visit.

In addition to five US Presidents both good and awful (mostly awful), Yale alumni include Meryl Streep, the great public servant John Kerry, Anderson Cooper, Cole Porter, Jodie Foster, Janet Yellen, Edward J. Norton, Sigourney Weaver, that great debunker of morons Paul Krugman, Paul A. Giamatti, Paul Newman, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Oliver Stone, Brian Dennehy, Sam Waterston, Sam Wagstaff, Charles Ives, Richard Serra, William Boeing, Indra Nooyi, Murray Gell-Mann, Benoit Mandelbrot, Frank Shorter, Sargent Shriver, Eero Saarinen, Benjamin Spock, Maya Lin and Eli Whitney. Stated differently, find a bunch of successful people in any discipline and a disproportionate number will be Yale grads.

Stunning.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Founded in 1764, Brown is one of but nine schools dating from before the American Revolution. A healthy endowment sees to it that the 6,300 undergraduates and 2,200 post graduates are ensconced in pristine surroundings on the gorgeous 143 acre campus in beautiful Providence, Rhode Island. Size appears to be inversely proportional to quality for this, the smallest of the US states by area, is also home to its finest arts school, the neighboring Rhode Island School of Design. Indeed a shared double degree with RISD is to be had for five year students.

Brown was the first Ivy League school to offer engineering studies and also has the distinction of permitting students to design their own courses. Nothing is mandatory here. So well known is this concept that it is now known as the ‘Brown Curriculum’.

Prize winners galore grace the alumni and faculty counts here, from Nobels and National Medal of Sciences winners to Rhodes Scholars and MacArthur Genius fellows. This is as good as it gets in American academia.

The campus is a thing of beauty and my son and I enjoyed a splendid – and rarely dry – day in wandering around. We were made to feel very much at home by staff and students in this beautiful setting, a testament to the civilizing power of the liberal psyche, one much under attack today by the forces of darkness seeking to usurp the American Republic. Brown fills you with the knowledge that this evil is but a temporary setback to progress from the Age of Enlightenment on. This is not a flame that can possibly be extinguished and if we came away encouraged by this realization then that is how it should be after a visit to one of the world’s greatest schools.

Little narrative is needed for what follows. Just gaze on the sublime beauty, the many quiet places, the expanses of lawns and air which make this a hallowed academic setting.

Brown’s mascot is the bear.

The cupola in octagonal Robinson Hall, once a library, now the Department of Economics.

The reading room in the Hay Gallery, recently restored – right down to modern furniture – with a grant form India’s Mittal family. Mittals graduated here in ’12 and ’15. And we seek to deny their compatriots American citizenship?

‘Idee de Pietra’ by Giuseppe Penone. High whimsy.

Hammock studies.

Untitled (Lamp/Bear) by Urs Fischer. Public art is everywhere on the campus grounds.

Even Brown cannot escape the obligatory ugly. This high rise gaol masquerades as the List Art building.

The Wriston Quad, named after a former President of the University.

An appropriately named crossroad on which to conclude our tour.

There are so many prominent alumni of Brown that it’s hard to know where to start. They include the great philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., donor of a magnificent library on the campus, Janet Yellen, the most powerful person in the world, Ted Turner, Oren B. Cheney, the founder of Bates College, George Kidd Teal, inventor of the first silicon transistor, Emma Watson, Walter/Wendy Carlos of synthesizer fame, and if that’s not enough the list of distinguished faculty members is every bit as long.