Images of a New England Seacoast: 1900

West Bend Art Museum

West Bend, WI

(414) 334-9638

Images of a New England Seacoast: 1900 - 1950

January 13 - February 21, 1999

left to right: Abbott, Motif from Block Square; Crane, Cabin by the Sea; Walter Bollendonk, Heavy Seas off Cape Ann, no date, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches; Thayer, Nearest Way Home

left to right: Vincent, Navy Landing, Rockport; Harold S.Maddocks, Gertrude Thibeaud & Bluenose, Schooner Race; 1938, oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches; Wengenroth, September Storm; Childe Hassam, Rockport, Granite Pier.

From the 19th century on, American painters were drawn to the light in New England and its amazing land formations.

left: Frederick J. Mulhaupt, Gloucester Harbor,Winter, no date, oil on canvas board, 14 x 16 inches

This exhibition displays a legacy of painters and printmakers who lived or summered on Cape Ann, an island that juts out from the Massachusetts shore, 300 miles north of Boston. Many were graduates of Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, students of luminaries William Morris Hunt, Edmund C. Tarbell and William Paxton. Other artists came from the land-locked Midwestern states of Missouri and Illinois. Some came for a visit and some never left this amazing landscape.

This exhibition includes fifty paintings portraying the seacoast of Cape Ann. The landscape first attracted writers and then artists to this area creating a collective portrait of this country. right: Johnson, Fisherman's Paraphernalia

Artists are still a vital part of the life and commerce in Gloucester and Rockport. This exhibit is circulated by Smith Kramer, Inc. Fine Art Services (see The David Smith Story: Sharing the Arts) and was curated by Rockport Art Association in Rockport, Massachusetts.

left to right: Anthony Thieme (1888-1954), Old Salt Barque, no date, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches; Hudson, Pounding Surf; Vincent, Italian Fishing Boats; Richard A. Holberg, Three Men in a Boat, no date, gouache on paper, 10 x 14 inches.

For further biographical information on selected artists cited in this article please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.

rev. 7/23/10

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