AFA Autumn 2021

Autumn 48 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com A round the turn of the twentieth century many American artists began to gather seasonally into informal “colonies” dotted across the country from California to the Northeast. Peterborough in New Hampshire, Provincetown in Massachusetts, Old Lyme and Cos Cob in Connecticut, and Ogunquit in Maine, many of them coastal sites, were among the most important eastern areas that hosted visiting artists. This exhibition, Cape Ann and Monhegan Island Vistas: Contrasted New England Art Colonies, organized by the Monhegan Museum of Art & History in conjunction with the Cape Ann Museum, gathers works executed by some of the many landscape artists who worked both on Monhegan Island, some ten miles off the coast of Maine, and at seaside Cape Ann in Massachusetts. The two areas are otherwise different in every way except for the attractiveness of their eye-catching marine vistas, the historic importance of the fishing industry, and to this day the presence of artists, both professional and amateur, behind nearly every other rock, tree, or building. Works by the selected artists who visited both areas record the differences between the two locales. Monhegan Island is a tiny outcropping, about a mile-and-a- half long and half-a-mile wide, an hour’s ride by mail boat off the Maine coast. The village consists of scattered, carpenter- shaped, wood-framed single houses punctuated by a few hotels and boarding houses, a church, and a one-room schoolhouse, all connected by rough gravel roads traversed by foot, golf carts, or pick-up trucks. The Monhegan Museum of Art & History, located in the historic lighthouse complex, overlooks the village from its perch atop Lighthouse Hill. The year-round resident population has never risen above two hundred, and these days CAPE AND ISLAND VISTAS by James F. O’Gorman Fig. 1: Eric Hudson (1864–1932), Under Dark Sky, n.d. Oil on canvas, 24¼ x 20¼ inches. Monhegan Museum of Art & History; Gift of James F. O’Gorman and Jean Baer O’Gorman.