There’s a new Winslow Homer mural at the bend of Maplewood and Poplar on the former Linsky’s service station property, Cape Ann Auction headquarters since November 2022.
159 Maplewood Avenue, Gloucester, Mass. Read more about this Studio fresh mural project inspired by Homer’s works here (Awesome Gloucester).
Both Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) and The Flirt depict figures in a cat boat in Gloucester harbor.
Image: Winslow Homer (1836-1910), The Flirt, 1874, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art acquisition, 2014 (Mellon collection)
Image: Winslow Homer, Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), 1873-1876, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art acquisition (Wildenstein Gallery), 1943. Gift of the W. L. and May T. Mellon Foundation.
The Winslow Homer marker on the corner of Dale Ave & Main for Gloucester’s HarborWalk features Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) thanks to permission from the National Gallery of Art.
Haskell’s House, 316 Main Street, is one of more than 110 homes and vistas in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that inspired artist, Edward Hopper (1882-1967).
Gloucester merchant, public official (city councilor / state representative), and Master Mariner, Melvin Haskell (1848-1933), commissioned the house in 1884.
Hopper and artist, Jo Nivison (1883-1968), were married in 1924. They nicknamed the fancy house high atop the hill the Wedding Cake House. The famous drawing was originally purchased by American master painter, George Bellows (1882-1925), from a sensational Hopper solo exhibition held in the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in 1924. The watercolor changed hands and was eventually gifted to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, by Mr. and Mrs. Herbert A. Goldstone in 1996. Hopper depicted the house in two other works, both side views from Prospect street rather than this view from Main Street.
The house was listed for sale at $830,000 throughout the spring and summer of 2018. Landscaping today involved major brush and tree removal. The result will be a scene closer to the one experienced by artists Edward Hopper and Jo Nivison in the 1920s. The scenic locale is a power spot: down the block from the Crow’s Nest and across the street from Gloucester’s Inner Harbor, Beauport Hospitality’s Cruiseport and Seaport Grill venues, Cape Ann Whale Watch, and Gorton’s.
Aymar, Jimmy, Edgar and Pedro were some of the adroit and brave tree climbing removal crew with ALZ Landscaping and Tree Service out of Lynn, Massachusetts. The unwieldy trees grew threateningly high.
American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isle of Shoals at the Peabody Essex Museum is one of the best exhibitions I saw this year. Go. You will come nearly as close as any observer can to feeling the rapturous meeting of an artist’s take with the shimmering world.
Hassam’s paintings don’t reproduce well in books, or photography. They need to be addressed– sized up, walked towards. Inhaled.
This approach is beneficial even if you study just one. But my, what luxury seeing so many in one place at one time. Again and again, the show brought forth connections and insight.”Funny, I hadn’t seen that before,” I found myself thinking, “Artists Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud are coming to mind.”
The exhibition features more than 40 Hassam oil paintings and watercolors of the eastern seaboard dating from the late 1880s to 1912–an Isle of Shoals painting reunion, with secrets revealed.
The Peabody Essex Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art co-organized and partnered with marine scientists at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Cornell University, and the University of New Hampshire. Their new research examined all the sites on the island, and Hassam’s painting process. I liked the research, the pacing of the installation, and the thoughtful viewshed. Besides the two museums, loans came from near and mostly far such as: private collections from coast to coast (which I’d never see); the Portland Museum of Art; Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis; Yale (Sinclair Lewis gifted that one to Yale!); Wichita Art Museum; Toledo Museum of Art; Smith; Smithsonian; and the National Gallery of Art.
Basically all painting is abstraction: I relished the chance to study so many in one spot.
I was not a fan of the piped in sound, nor all the wall paint choices as my senses were already acutely challenged by observation. My disdain for the canned ambient sound was so distracting, I had to take a break. On my second visit, the scent of coconut wafted out the entrance. My goodness, have they piped in fake scent like a boutique hotel or experiential attraction, too? They hadn’t. It was my overreaction in the wake of another visitor’s adornment, a lingering fragrance, perhaps sunscreen on a summer day.
Tucked away within the Hassam exhibit was a good photo installation of Alexandra de Steiguer’s work as the Isles winter keeper– for 19 years! For anyone who wondered more about life as a keeper after reading The Light Between Oceans, de Steiguer wrote about her real experiences here, http://connected.pem.org/alone-on-an-island/. It’s beautiful!
More photos of the Hassam installation at the Peabody Essex Museum:
Peabody Essex Museum Hassam bannersPeabody Essex Museum Hassam 2016Childe Hassam Sunset at Sea 1911 anonymous loan Poppies, Isles of Shoals,1891 National Gallery of Art acquisition in 1997Childe Hassam, illustration for the Island Garden, w/c, 1892 from the Smithsonian (gifted in 1929)An Island Garden by Celia Thaxter, 1893, with illustrations by HassamChilde Hassam, White Island Light, Isles of Shoals at Sundown, 1899, Smith (a 1973 gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hodgkinson (Laura White Cabot, class of 1922) ) Smith has a beauty. detail of Hassam at SmithChilde Hassam, The West Wind, Isle of Shoals, 1904, Yale, bequest of Sinclair Lewis to the Beinecke (1952) impossible to photograph well and will knock your socks off. Startling.Childe Hassam, The West Wind, Isle of Shoals, 1904, Yale, bequest of Sinclair Lewis to the Beinecke (1952)Childe Hassam, The West Wind, Isle of Shoals, 1904, Yale, bequest of Sinclair Lewis to the Beinecke (1952)Summer Sea, Isles of Shoals, 1902, o/c, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, gift of Florence Scott Libbey in 1912Jelly Fish, 1912, Wichita Art Museum, KS, John W and Mildred L Graves Collection (acquired 1986)Childe Hassam, Moonrise Isle of Shoals, 1899, collection Donald Head, Old Grandview Ranch, CA Childe Hassam, The Laurel in the Ledges, Appledore, 1895, North Carolina Museum of Art,Childe Hassam, Lyman’s Ledge, Appledore, 1903, private collection “northern bayberry, popularly confused with laurel, wedged into the deep clefts”(detail)
“During his first summers on Appledore, Hassam stayed near to the places favored by his close friend, Celia Thaxter (1834-1894).”
Stuart Davis, 1939, Sol Horn, photographer. Federal Art Project, Photographic Division collection, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian.
Pulitzer prize winning critic, Holland Cotter, gives the Stuart Davis (1892-1964) show at the Whitney Museum a mostly glowing review in today’s New York Times. One thing is a given. If the art of American modernist Stuart Davis is mentioned, Gloucester will pop up somewhere in the text.
“Place was important to him, but the modern world was increasingly about movement and he wanted to picture that. A 1931 painting, “New York-Paris No. 2,” put us in both cities simultaneously, with a Hotel de France set against the Third Avenue El.
In the exuberant “Swing Landscape” of 1938, a mural commissioned by the Works Progress Administration for a Brooklyn housing project but never installed, we see bits and pieces of Gloucester — ships, buoys, lobster traps — but basically we’re in a whole new universe of jazzy patterns and blazing colors, a landscape defined not by signs but by sensations: sound, rhythm, friction…”
Sometimes big shows bring art to market. Last fall the Stuart Davis 1960 painting Ways and Means, 24 x 32, sold at auction for $3,189,000 at Christie’s.
the 1940 Composition June Jitterbug Jive for $689,000,
and the Autumn Landscape Rockport, 1940, 8 x 12 for $905,000.
Meanwhile, Sotheby’s sold New York Street, 1940, 11 x 16, $490,000.
This month, Sotheby’s sold a 1960 Gloucester harbor scene for $100,000 on June 9th, and the 1919 “Gloucester” painting measuring 24 x 30 fetched $51,000.
Good Morning Gloucester 