Please meet The Cobra by American artist Eric Pape (1870–1938). Finding her was the result of attending the Gertrude Cawein at Hammond Castle Museum exhibition opening this past April. (Pape lived in the Castle as a close associate of John Hays Hammond Jr. for a time.) Now, I did not meet The Cobra in person; the painting is actually lost in this moment. Yet I entered the wormhole that night, marveling at Pape’s work; chatting with Dr. Gregory Conn, one of the world’s leading Pape experts and biographers whose collection was on display; and learning more about the extraordinary yet somewhat overlooked backstory of Hammond and the Museum itself, as well as the equally compelling story of its current renaissance. (See Museums of the Moment, beginning on page 40). Museums are “wormholes to other worlds.”
