By Ruth Melville

Mia Weiner’s gallery shows both contemporary and Old Master works.

Art lovers in northwest Connecticut now have a new and unusual gallery to visit. Norfolk resident Mia Weiner has recently opened Pinacoteca in Bantam, where she will show and sell European paintings and drawings from the 16th to 20th century. Although she has been a gallery owner and dealer for 35 years, this gallery represents a change in direction for her.

Until now, Weiner has specialized in selling Old Master drawings and oil sketches. Her start as a gallerist was fortuitous. After college, she was living in New York and studying German and Italian in preparation for going to graduate school in art history. One day she passed by a gallery on 84th Street selling Old Master drawings. “Until then,” she says, “I didn’t realize you could actually buy them.” She walked in and told the proprietor, “You have to hire me!” She volunteered to come in for free on Saturdays, but was soon working six days a week. She ended up staying there four years.

She trained her eye by looking at drawings wherever she could. “It’s the best way to learn,” she says. “The more you look, the more you learn.” She went to Chatsworth House in England and to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, staying all day in the galleries, day after day. Over time she developed her eye, “a sensitivity,” she says, “that makes it so rewarding.”

In the earlier years of her career, Weiner owned a private gallery in New York City. Over time, however, the art market changed and collectors stopped going to galleries and dealers, preferring to buy at big art fairs and salerooms. Weiner realized she didn’t need to live in New York City to continue her business.

In 1994, Weiner and her husband, Martin Braid, moved to Norfolk, which they had come to know from driving up to Tanglewood in the summer. She still goes back and forth to New York to sell at fairs and exhibits, and also relies on the website that Braid designed for her early on (oldmasterdrawings.com), one of the first and, she thinks, likely the best for drawings. Many of her European customers, in particular, like to use the Internet to purchase art.

It was a trip last March to Reggio Emilia with her husband that led her to rethink her concentration on Old Masters. On the trip she saw paintings by many 19th- and 20th-century artists who, though not well known, were very good painters. “I would like to sell them,” she thought. This change in focus spurred her desire to open a gallery near her Norfolk home.

Once she had her flash of inspiration, Weiner moved quickly. She concentrated her search for a suitable space in the Litchfield area, and settled on the ground floor of a recently renovated house in Bantam. She moved into the new gallery by the end of May. The gallery is called Pinacoteca, which means “picture gallery” in Italian.

Weiner is still in the process of shifting her stock to more contemporary work, so the visitor to Pinacoteca will see an interesting mixture of work on the gallery’s walls, both Old Masters and current artists. At present, Weiner is featuring two landscape painters, Kevin McNamara, from Ireland, and Richard Piccolo, who lives and works in Italy. McNamara, whose painting “Winter Light”, perfectly captures the dusky purple of snow in winter twilight, has been visiting the Weiners this summer and painting in the fields off Westside Road.

Pinacoteca is on Route 202 in Bantam, just a short walk down the street from the Arethusa Farm ice cream store. The gallery is open six months a year, from May through October. Hours are Thursday to Sunday, 1 to 7 p.m. or by appointment. Phone 860-480-0100 or email MWeiner@OldMasterDrawings.com.

Phhotos by Bruce Frisch.