Jim Lumley learned to appreciate nature’s beauty at an early age.
His parents, the late Mabel and Al Lumley, planted extensive lilac bushes on the family’s Pelham property, which for decades has been a popular visiting site for lilac lovers, picnickers and people who simply enjoy the variety of color. The property’s name says it all: Lilacland.
Lumley, who’s now 75 and has run Lilacland for about 30 years, was so inspired by the colors and light that he took up landscape painting as an adult, first as a hobby and then very seriously.
When he was about 40, he sold his real estate company and went to study in Cape Cod with Henry Hensche, a noted impressionist painter who in turn had studied with one of the first American impressionists, Charles Hawthorne, in the early 1900s.