The art colonies of New England

Magazine Antiques, April, 1999 by Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Tracie Felker

Ogunquit's modernists also worked in three dimensions. Field's successor as the leader of the art community was the sculptor Robert Laurent. The son of a fisherman and a weaver, Laurent was born in Concarneau, a well-known art colony in Brittany. Discovered by Field, who was visiting France, he accompanied the older artist to Rome, where he studied drawing and became an apprentice frame maker. When Laurent immigrated to the United States in 1902, he initially supported himself by making frames for such leading New York City painters as Hassam and Robert Henri (1865-1929). His training in wood carving - a skill required of flame makers - soon led him to sculpture.

The Wave [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED], Laurent's masterpiece in alabaster, is a modernist's response to Victorian techniques of molded and cast sculpture, then out of favor. Carved directly from the stone, it harks back in style and execution to the folk art collected by Field and interpreted in two dimensions by painters such as Kuniyoshi. To be truly modern in Ogunquit one had to look to the past both technically and stylistically.

Laurent's sensuous vision of the female form gliding through the sea offers a stark contrast to Woodbury's more decorous vision in Ledges [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Woodbury's prim bather contemplates the vast Atlantic from the safety of a rock, while Laurent's swims with natural abandon. The Wave was so well received in New York City that it was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum of Art shortly after it was first shown in 1926.

Laurent, Hirsch, Kuniyoshi, and the other Ogunquit modernists moved the image of old New England in an increasingly abstract direction. Figures were simplified and the picture plane flattened. Marsden Hartley, a native of Maine who spent the summer of 1917 at Ogunquit, pared the still life to its essentials in Lobster on a Black Background (Pl. XI). The lobster, devoid of shadow and modeling, appears as a fiat symbol of life on the coast.

The interpretations of the New England scene differed greatly in style and attitude in Old Lyme and Ogunquit, yet remained strikingly uniform in their mission. The past is invariably portrayed with respect and is always made useful to the present. Impressionists and modernists alike found much in common when summering in old New England.

We would like to thank William H. Truettner and Stephanie L. Taylor for their thoughtful comments about this article. We are also indebted for their ideas to Roger B. Stein and Bruce Robertson.

A related exhibition entitled Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory is on view until August 22 at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

1 New Haven Morning Journal and Courier, July 5, 1907, quoted in Jeffrey W. Andersen, Old Lyme: The American Barbizon (Lyme Historical Society, Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut, 1982), p. 6.

2 "The Lyme Summer School and Its Theory of Art," Lamp, vol. 27 (August 1903), p. 7.

3 "American Country Dwellings. I," Century Magazine, vol. 32 (May 1886), p. 5, quoted in Lisa N. Peters, Visions of Home: American Impressionist Images of Suburban Leisure and Country Comfort (Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1997), pp. 102, 104.