The Florence Griswold Museum presents “Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England,” an exhibition developed in collaboration with the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. Featuring 73 works drawn from the collections of the Portland Museum of Art and the Florence Griswold Museum, the exhibition is on view through January 31.
The art colonies of New England played a key role in the creation of a regional identity in the early Twentieth Century. Art colonies in Old Lyme and Cos Cob, Conn., and Ogunquit and Monhegan, Maine, were inspiration for nationally recognized artists, including Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri and George Bellows, among others. “Call of the Coast” chronicles the development of Impressionist Connecticut and Modernist Maine.
The coast of New England has long attracted tourists and artists drawn to the primal drama of the ocean. The Nineteenth Century brought changes as coastal communities shifted from being an industrialized economic resource to a therapeutic shelter where the middle class enjoyed leisure time. Artists banded together for purposes of camaraderie, creativity and commerce, and founded coastal art colonies from Connecticut to Maine. Old Lyme, Cos Cob, Ogunquit and Monhegan were settled at different times by artists and illustrated life in each community.
Each colony offered artists the opportunity to commune with the coast in its different guises. Maine offered sweeping vistas, dramatic cliffs and craggy textures, while Connecticut’s eddying waterways provided a quiet mirror for autumnal foliage, old houses and gentle hillsides.
Beginning in the early 1870s, the village of Cos Cob attracted artists from New York. These artists included Impressionists J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman, who summered at the Holley House, the center of the community. Summer classes taught by Twachtman and Weir during the 1890s under the auspices of the Art Students League brought artists such as Charles Ebert, Mary Roberts Ebert, Daniel Putnam Brinley and the Japanese artist Genjiro Yeto to the school and encouraged experimentation. Accomplished painters such as Impressionist Theodore Robinson and Childe Hassam also painted in Cos Cob.
In 1899, Henry Ward Ranger arrived in Old Lyme, attracted by the tidal marshes and ever-changing light conditions. While Twachtman saw the Connecticut coast as a place of isolation, Ranger viewed himself as the leader of a new school of American landscape painting. Ranger stayed in the boardinghouse of Florence Griswold and invited his artist friends, including Lewis Cohen, Louis Paul Dessar, William Henry Howe, Henry Rankin Poore and Clark Voorhees to join him; an art colony was born. Miss Griswold’s home became the epicenter of the Lyme Art Colony. The arrival in 1903 of the dynamic Hassam inspired Old Lyme painters to experiment with high-key color and greater impasto associated with Impressionism. Just as Ranger presided over the colony in its early years, Hassam set the tone for its later phase, for which it is best known.
Artist Clarence Chatterton summered in Ogunquit for nearly 30 years, producing vivid, frank paintings that convey his friend Edward Hopper’s influence. The still, sunlit streetscape of “Road to Oqunquit” is a striking interpretation of the New York Modernist’s interest in light, architecture and man-made spaces. Tensions between the two groups held until the mid-Twentieth Century when local organizations formed to preserve both aspects of the town’s remarkable role in the history of American art. The tale of Ogunquit illustrates that, in New England, Modernism and regionalism were but two sides of the same coin.
The Florence Griswold Museum is at 96 Lyme Street. For information, www.FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org or 860-434-5542, ext 111.
