AFA Autumn 2021

2021 Antiques & Fine Art 51 Fig. 5: Aldro T. Hibbard (1886–1972), Motif #1, Rockport Harbor, n.d. Oil on canvasboard, 17 x 21 inches. The James Collection. Promised gift of Janet and William Ellery James to the Cape Ann Museum. decade that number included Sunday painters as well as famous ones, such as George Bellows, Randall Davey, Rockwell Kent, and Leon Kroll. The years that followed, the late teens and the nineteen-twenties, saw the arrival of Edward Hopper, James Fitzgerald, Margaret Patterson, and others. At the same time, the more easily reached Cape Ann began to host its own distinguished list of artists, including William Morris Hunt, Winslow Homer, Frank Duveneck, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Theresa Bernstein, Edward Hopper, and on and on. Many more artists who established these sites in American cultural history are less familiar to the general public. The exhibition is weighted toward their work as more representative of the art life of the communities. In every case, the artists worked at both sites, often revealing in pairs of works the differences between the Cape and the Island. Among the first artists to arrive on Monhegan was Eric Hudson (1864–1932), a photographer as well as painter who sought out locations along the Maine coast that offered vistas of marine activity. His Under Dark Sky (Fig. 1) could just as well have been inspired by the sight of a sailboat and dory in Gloucester harbor just