Douglas Volk and the arts and crafts in Maine

Renowned in his day as an artist and teacher, Douglas Volk has received little attention in recent years, and his role in the arts and crafts movement has been all but forgotten. From 1898 until about 1908, Hewn Oaks, the summer house he and his wife, Marion Larrabee Volk, built in western Maine (see Figs. 3-6 and 9), was an active "Center of Art and Handicraft," (1) where Volk determined to "revive a few of the old industries that were carried on in the farm houses" (2) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although he inspired and guided the venture, Volk kept to his easel painting, while his wife, children, friends, and neighbors were busy carving wood and making rugs. The Volks operated a small printing press, organized exhibitions, and offered classes. They encouraged local residents in the production of handicrafts and in February 1902 formally organized what they called the Sabatos Handicraft Society. (3) The Hewn Oaks movement enjoyed a modest amount of publicity during the early 1900s, but it soon faded out of view.

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The property, an idyllic setting on Kezar Lake in Center Lovell, looking toward the White Mountains of New Hampshire, eventually passed largely intact to the Volks' daughter-in-law, the artist Jessie McCoig Volk. In 2006 the University of Maine Foundation, the beneficiary of her estate, sold at auction the artworks and historical furnishings that had been preserved in eight buildings. (4) Before her death, Jessie Volk donated some family records to the Archives of American Art, but the auction dispersed thousands of additional documents and photographs that detailed the artistic accomplishments and connections of this remarkable family. While piecing together the complete story may no longer be possible, this article will attempt to provide an overview of Hewn Oaks and the artistic endeavors the Volks pursued there.

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The son of the sculptor Leonard Wells Volk (Fig. 14), Douglas Volk studied with Jean Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1873 to 1879. His fellow American students included George de Forest Brush (1855-1941) and Julian Alden Weir. Volk's portrait of Weir, painted in Paris about 1877, remained at Hewn Oaks (Fig. 8). Another student, Wyatt Eaton, painted Volk's portrait in 1875 (Fig. 2). (5) By the time he was twenty, Volk's paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon and the United States Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and his future as an artist was assured.

In the 1880s and 1890s Volk won acclaim for his historical and idealized subjects. Embracing the colonial revival, he turned to seventeenth-century New England for such works as Puritan Captives (whereabouts unknown), which was exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Some critics felt that his Accused of Witchcraft of 1884 (whereabouts unknown) gave "him an eminently strong title to be classed among our most competent historical painters." (6)

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At the time Volk was building Hewn Oaks, he created Song of the Pines (whereabouts unknown), in which a lovely young woman wearing a long robe and clasping a pine branch against her breast stands with her head uplifted against the background of tall pines. Critics hailed the painting as a "fine example of exalted symbolism." (7)

Volk's career as an art educator began in 1879 with a teaching appointment at the Cooper Institute in New York City. Seven years later the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts hired him to be the founding director of its School of Fine Arts (now Minneapolis College of Art and Design), a position he held until 1893. He then returned to New York where he joined the faculty of the Art Students League and resumed his post at the Cooper Institute. In 1895 he also taught at the Cowles Art School in Boston. Between 1898 and 1906 he apparently held no major teaching positions, focusing instead on his own career--and on Hewn Oaks.

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While living in Minneapolis, Volk had acquired a summer studio and retreat in Osceola, Wisconsin, which he and Marion enjoyed with their four children: Leonard (1882-1891), Wendell, Marion (1888-1973), and Gerome (1890-1955). A contemporary description conveys the artistic character of the place, where the rough walls of the large living room were

hung with all kinds of artistic draperies and panels, from fine Oriental
embroideries to stained burlaps. Engravings, etchings and drawings in
plain frames are hung in careless profusion in all unoccupied wall
space. The great brick chimney is flanked by large tree trunks and piles
of boulders, and many receptacles, filled with an infinite variety of
the beautiful native ferns, occupy corners or hang from the ceiling,
which is also ornamented by many lanterns of different designs. (8)

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After returning to New York in 1893, the Volks looked to Maine for a vacation house. Douglas Volk had visited the state in 1880 when he took his class of Cooper Institute art students--fourteen young women--on a month-long sketching trip to the Sebago Lake area. (9) It may have been George de Forest Brush who introduced the Volks to Center Lovell; he rented a cottage there in 1893 and expected them to visit. (10) In 1896 the Volks visited friends in nearby Bridgton, Maine, (10) and by 1897 another friend, Percival Chubb (1860-1960) acquired a summer house in Center Lovell. (11) Chubb was an active member of the Society for Ethical Culture, founded by the philosopher Felix Adler (1851-1933) in New York City in 1876, with which Volk was also associated. Several members of the society summered in Lovell and held devotional meetings in a dramatic grove of pines dubbed the "Cathedral" on the Hewn Oaks property. (12)