The way we were
The NHA's 'Art Colony' exhibit remembers when island artists were on Easy Street
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
Nantucket's summer residents need only walk two or three city blocks - popping their heads into Nantucket's galleries - to view (reasonably expensive) works by 19th and 20th century American artists. A stroll along Old South Wharf can yield the purchase of a painting from a gallery in a charming, converted fishing shack, whose floors are clean and painted white.

Left: "PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM (BILLY) RUSSELL," Ruth Haviland Sutton

The civility (and status) of all this, however, was very much absent when Nantucket took its first steps towards becoming an art colony in the early 20th century, when island artists "worked from studios and gallery spaces created from the relics of Nantucket's longvanished whaling past - the cluster of shacks, shanties, boathouses and old buildings that lay soaking in the sea air along Nantucket's waterfront," according to the Nantucket Historical Association, which opens "The Nantucket Art Colony, 1920 - 1945" this Saturday. (The exhibition runs through November 12.)

Ben Simons, the Robyn & John Davis Curator of Collections at the NHA, said the beginning of the Nantucket Arts Colony is dated at 1920, because that was the year instructor Frank Swift Chase arrived on island and Florence Lang bought the candlehouse that would become the island's first gallery.

Right:"RAINBOW FLEET," Frank Swift Chase

Soon after, Lang opened a gallery on Easy Street. A home to island artists, Easy Street gave way to the Kenneth Taylor Gallery, which became a home for exhibits by the Artists' Association of Nantucket - whose establishment in 1945 punctuates the colony's lifespan.

The NHA has worked in collaboration with the AAN to amass a selection of works by these early pioneers, people like Chase, Emily Hoffmeier, Ruth Haviland Sutton, Anne Ramsdell Congdon, Isabelle Tuttle, Tony Sarg. Austin Strong, Edgar Jenney and Elizabeth Saltonstall.

Their intentions, as artists, were fairly pure - they wanted to abscond from the mainland to a beautiful place that would act as both subject and inspiration.

"Much of the island's appeal, in addition to its natural beauty and beaches, lay in the perception of it as a kind of living museum of the quaintness and charm of 'old times' - of the simpler, pre-industrial way of life that the war had destroyed," according to Simons. "On Nantucket, this rustic charm was largely the effect of the demise of the great whaling era and the resulting nationwide depression that left much of the town, and the wharves in particular, wrapped in a ghostly aura of dereliction and decay." This is what brought Eastman Johnson to Nantucket in the early 1870s; his works were some of the first images of this remarkable, run-down island to pique the curiosity of other artists on the mainland.

Above: "YERXA'S BOAT SHOP," Anne Ramsdell Congdon. Upper right: "THE OLD MILL," Anne Ramsdale Congdon.

Ironically, the artists who came to Nantucket did so because they could live on the cheap in those little fishing shacks on Old South Wharf, which Lang and her husband, Henry, converted into affordable workspaces for the artists, renting them out for $50 to $70 dollars for the summer.

The studios were Spartan, outfitted with cots, soapstone sinks, shared toilets and showers, according to Simons. "Lang's plan was to create a casual atmosphere that would allow visiting artists to experiment, share studio space, socialize, discuss their art and embark on field trips to distant sketching spots."

Lang's plan worked, and the colorful personalities on the wharf became as much a draw to tourists as the colorful paintings.

"The artists who came here inherited Nantucket from the whaling industry," Simons said. "When Lang purchased a lot of the harbor front property, it was dilapidated. It was through her vision that Nantucket developed as a harbor and a haven for the arts."

This artistic escapism, which was written up in various newspapers (including the New York Times), played a large role in the island's economic resurrection via tourism. That these artists could and did give it all up to live simply and with the intent to make something beautiful was in many ways inspirational to the patrons who left their busy, well-heeled lives on the mainland to summer here in comparative simplicity. The images these artists created became the iconography of this romantic life, and fed the tourism and development boom of the 1960s, '70s and '80s - when Walter Beinecke renovated and restored the aging waterfront, but also raised the rent on the South Wharf, so that struggling artists could no longer live and paint there. (Today, South Wharf is under the domain of New England Development.)

Bottom right: ROWBOATS," Jane Brewster Reid

Today, many talented island artists still paint (and sell) in the legacy left by the founders of the Nantucket Art Colony - producing images of landscapes and seascapes that those who come here looking for respite in the summers take home with them. But the savvy economic force to which the Art Colony contributed, intentionally or not, now compromises the creative process for many local artists, who must contend with the high cost of living. In the absence of a patron like Florence Lang, members of the newer generation of island artists are generally too busy working during the summer months to congregate daily and traverse the island to paint and socialize in relative ease, as they once did in the early 20th century - when members of the Nantucket Art Colony not only painted the greater Nantucket landscape but also became a visible

"THE CUSTODIAN OF THE DUMP," Austin Strong ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE were NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOC.

part of it. I

When: Opens Sat., May 26

and runs through Nov. 12

Where: Peter Foulger Gallery,

Nantucket Historical Association,

13 Broad St.

For more information,

please call 228-1894, ext. 0.

(A preview party will be held for NHA members on Friday, May 25, 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. in the NHA's Peter Foulger Gallery.)