Art Colony remnant survives at Harborview
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER

Two-by-four bracing barely holds up the crumbling red-painted brick walls; sheets of plywood cover the diamond-shaped windows that once showered sunlight into the painting studio of Ruth Haviland Sutton.

One of a handful of fishing shanties-cum-artist-studios that existed on this portion of the waterfront from 1917 through 1945, Candle House is now on its way to a modern makeover.

Similar cottages on Commercial and Washington streets also housed the likes of Ann Ramsdell Congdon, Emily Hoffmeier, Harriet Lord and Henry Stephens Eddy at various times and became an epicenter for Nantucket artists.

"Could they talk, what stories the buildings on the corner of Commercial Wharf and Washington Street could tell!" Sutton noted in an article she wrote for Historic Nantucket's April 1959 issue. "Close to the Salt Sea Harbor, they have gone through a saturation of whale oil to slaughter house gore to artists' turpentine and paint."

Nantucket's Art Colony was a sanctuary of sorts for seasonal and resident island artists, with its own ever-present yet ever-changing subject matter: the harbor. For Sutton, it so connected her artistic talents to her love of Nantucket that she eventually bought the harbor front cottage Candle House and turned it into a studio space, gallery and residence.

PHOTO BY JAKE LANCASTER

Now nearly falling down, its ivy stripped from roof and walls, Candle House is to become "Hermit Crab," one of seven buildings of the new luxury apartment compound, Harborview Place. Developer Mitch Willey plans to turn Sutton's former studio into two apartments, but says he will retain its historic structural elements to the closest detail possible, per order of the Historic District Commission.

"We're having them do a plan for restoring it," said HDC Administrator Mark Voigt. "A lot of the historic fabric has been removed over time, maybe 10 percent of the sheeting on the roof is old. We're trying to get them to reuse as much of the brick as possible; 50 to 75 percent of the roof rafters can be used."

"FIFTY TO SEVENTY DOLLARS" Florence Lang, an amateur painter born in Montclair, N.J., is still revered in the island arts world for revitalizing the waterfront - not for her paintings, but for what she did for artists of her time. In 1917, according to the Nantucket Historical Association's digital exhibition, "The Nantucket Art Colony, 1920-45," found at www.nha.org, Lang and her husband, Henry, purchased much of the waterfront land along Washington Street, sections of Commercial Wharf and Easy Street.

PHOTO BY JAKE LANCASTER From this rotted window, ragged, nearly disintegrated shingles now ringing its frame, Painter Ruth Haviland Sutton once glimpsed the harbor for her oil and pastel paintings, and her printmaking. Haviland's former studio, gallery and residence, known as Candle House, are soon to be carefully dismantled and much of its original framing members and bricks used in the restoration of the cottage.

They also acquired Old South Wharf and used it to run Island Service Company, that they founded in 1917, and was then the island's main freight hauler for ice, fuel, lumber, appliances and food. Florence transformed the wharf's fishing shacks into humble, utilitarian artist studios, renting them for the summer at $50 to $70 each.

"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," said the NHA.

One particular grouping of cottages on Commercial Wharf and Washington Street centered around the Matthew Crosby candle company's former counting house that R.E. Burgess converted into a seven-apartment building around 1910 called "Harborview" (Willey is now renovating the building and calling it Crow's Nest). Other artists' cottages had names like "The Scallop," "Candle House," "Wateredge," "Barnacle," "Sailloft" and "Barnsite." The Scallop, to be renamed "Nautilus" as one of the new development's buildings, was originally a fusion of two shanties with a porch from the Nantucket Railroad station that Florence Lang had purchased.

Wateredge, now called Waters Edge, and still standing where it was built next to The Scallop, was once used by "Doc" Brown who "smoked fish and smoked himself," said Sutton in her Historic Nantucket article. Candle House, originally built as a storage building by the Crosby candle company in 1880s for whale oil used in candle manufacturing, was later used by a coal business, as a slaughterhouse and an icehouse, according to an NHA Research Library database listing. When the Art Colony existed, artists showed their work in Candle House.

"The Candle House became an exhibition gallery, a huge north window giving good light; a grape arbor making pleasant shade in which to sit, and a pleasant shade from inside the gallery looking straight through the wide doors, over the lawn to the harbor," Sutton recalled.

SHANGRA-LA ON COMMERCIALWHARF Frank Swift Chase, an art teacher who taught here from the 1920s to 1954, and widely considered the godfather of Nantucket's arts scene during that time, drew Sutton and her mother to the island in 1924. The next year, according to NHA records, Sutton lived with her mother in the Choo Choo Studio on Steamboat Wharf.

Sutton, a painter of portraits in pastels, an oil painter and a printmaker, made Nantucket her home in 1936. By that time, she was creating and showing her work at The Scallop during the summer, which she rented from Lang, and living in Harborview during the winter. An ardent supporter of the Sidewalk Art Show, which began in 1930, Sutton was a charter member of the Artists Association of Nantucket, from which much of the history of her life and the Art Colony was collected by art historian and current gallery director Bob Frazier.

When Florence Lang died in 1943, in what was likely an effort to preserve the Commercial Wharf portion of the Art Colony, Sutton bought four of the cottages from Lang's estate, revamped them and continued to lease them to artists at reasonable rental fees.

"I like it too well to ever change. We are a congenial group, mostly artists - and the ocean is our back door," Sutton later wrote about these wharf cottages.

She also brought in two used buildings from the cranberry bogs and converted them into artist cottages. Seven years later, in 1950, Sutton purchased Candle House to use as her studio and gallery, adding the unique north facing windows on the second floor to let in more natural light for painting. She also expanded the building by adding a living space on the southern end where she resided until her death in 1960, said Frazier.

Sutton's contribution to Nantucket's arts community is honored annually through the Ruth Haviland Sutton Scholarship at Nantucket High School. Each year, $6,000 ils awarded to one to three students "based on merit, character, scholastic standing, financial need, and ambition for higher education."

CANDLE HOUSE REBORN Willey bought the seven buildings - what had become Harbor View Apartments - in September, 2005 from Nantucket Island Resorts, which acquired them from First Winthrop, which had used the buildings for employee housing.

With his renovation of the buildings, Willey is taking the time and the care needed to rebuild Candle House, restoring the structure with as much of its original building materials as possible. However, retrofitting it for residential use took some compromise because of a conflict with Nantucket's building code and the HDC. In order for Willey to meet building code requirements for construction in a flood plain, he needed to raise up the building on piers and that - in addition to his idea of lifting off the roof to fit two units into the building - triggered more HDC concerns.

"The commission has been concerned about the structure because it has such a lengthy history and because it is a contributing structure, but the problem that we face is that it has had so much deferred maintenance over the years to the point where the brick wall is out of plumb by about a foot," said Voigt.

To satisfy both the building code and the HDC, Willey will raise the wooden half of the building out of the flood plain and onto a solid concrete foundation and put one apartment unit inside, but he will not remove the roof to add a second floor. The brick portion of the building, in keeping with its prior commercial use, will serve as the Harborview Place community center and office, with the second floor converted into an apartment.

After carefully dismantling Candle House - keeping and numbering all original and usable framing timbers and sheathing and also salvaging the bricks - Willey will, in rebuilding the wooden structure, employ the mortise-and-tenon traditional building technique for the frame, filling in any gaps with new framing members milled from the same type of wood, said Willey's New York City architect, Andrew D. Kotchen.

Willey also will rebuild the brick portion of the cottage using as many of the original bricks as he can, mixed with the closest matching bricks he can find.

To ensure the work is all done as promised, the HDC will do regular inspections and Kotchen will work closely with Voigt.

"It's really to prevent sort of a stopwork order; it's the opposite approach," said Voigt. "We've been talking about threshold inspections so the project only goes so far. There's going to be dismantling, then inspections, construction, then inspections… I think

it's going to be an interesting project overall." I