Twelve miles off the mid-Maine coast, Monhegan Island (a mere mile wide by two miles long), was settled by Englishman John Smith in 1614. Monhegan residents from that community sent fish to help the Pilgrims through their first long winter at Plymouth.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Monhegan's few residents were farmers and fishermen. Sheep and cows roamed the island while men fished from dories in Monhegan's waters. Their catch was dried in flake yards scattered along the shore. Women tended their island gardens and homes. Such was Monhegan life when, in 1858, the first artist arrived on the island.

White Mountain painter Aaron Draper Shattuck, in a letter dated June 13, 1858, described his trip to the island aboard the U.S. Schooner Vigilant. He wrote, "Monhegan Island has some wonderful things about it, lots of beautiful coves and grand cliffs rising high out of the sea. The surf was dashing terribly on the Eastern shore and throwing its spray like rain upon the rocks."

Over the subsequent 30 years, a few artists visited the island, including Milton J. Burns, William Edward Norton, and Otis S. Weber. They took rooms in island homes and hiked the island capturing on paper and canvas Monhegan's rugged natural beauty and the charm of its fishing shacks. In the late 1880s, when the first boarding house opened, artists began arriving in greater numbers, and thus began the Monhegan art colony. During the 1890s, a few dozen artists worked on the island, including William Trost Richards, Alfred T. Bricher, George Wharton Edwards, S. P. Rolt Triscott, Eric Hudson, George Everett, and Monhegan's first two women artists, Maud Briggs Knowlton and Alice Swett.

Work from that period is classic nineteenth century. Influenced by the Hudson River School, but working with more intimate landscape and seascape motifs, painters such as Shattuck painted rocks and cliffs along the coast. Luminists Richards and Bricher did atmospheric renderings from the water's edge, and watercolor artists such as Triscott and Weber worked within a classic English tradition. Refined watercolors and paintings from the period not only portray the extraordinary natural beauty of the remote island, but also give the viewer a feel for this isolated community and its interdependent residents.

After the turn of the century, things began to change. Robert Henri, who visited the island in 1903, was already strongly advocating a new American art, an art that was not derivative of European traditions but had its roots wholly within the American experience. For Henri, painting was not intended to reproduce a likeness of the subject but to make a statement, to express an idea or emotion, about the subject. Henri's circle of students and friends, often called Ashcan painters, would indeed create a new art, and those who followed Henri to the island in the subsequent fifteen years -- including George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, Randall Davey, Emil Holzhauer, and Clarence Chatterton -- were among the leaders in doing so. While on Monhegan, they created works of great strength and vitality. For example, working with complete surety, Bellows needed but a few broad brush strokes to communicate the power and beauty of an island vista or crashing surf. Monhegan works by these painters are less well known than their cityscapes and portraits, but they have an immediacy and freshness that deserves greater recognition.

American Impressionist Edward Willis Redfield had been Henri's close friend since their student days at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and their Wanderjahr through Europe. Redfield also visited the island in the summer of 1903, at Henri's suggestion. Many impressionists would follow Redfield to the island in the subsequent fifteen years, giving the island strong representation by the two most important movements in American art of the era. Although Redfield founded the Bucks County, PA art colony, it was primarily impressionists from the summer colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut (founded by Childe Hassam) who visited the island regularly during that period. Although Hassam never visited the island, Charles Ebert, William Chadwick, Frank Bicknell, Wilson Irvine, and Ernest Albert were among the ones who did.

Master marine painter Frederick Judd Waugh was also a Monhegan regular during the early part of the 1910s, capturing the remarkable dynamics of waves. By the mid-1910s, a few modernists, including Maurice Sterne and Andrew Dasburg, would paint the island as their movement began to gain attention from the art world, thanks in part to the famous Armory Show of 1913 when European impressionism and post-impressionism was introduced to American collectors and art critics. Fifteen of Monhegan's artists, mostly Ashcan painters and American Impressionists, exhibited in the Armory show, but it was the European artists who received all the attention and whose work had the biggest impact on the rise of modernism in America.

In 1914, the tercentenary of John Smith's settlement, a major art exhibition was held as part of the island festivities. Bellows, Ebert, and Waugh were the jurors for the exhibition, which showed the work of 18 artists, including three women -- Alice Swett, Alice Kent Stoddard, and Mary Roberts Ebert.

With Ashcan painters, American Impressionists, traditional marine painters, and modernists all working on the island together, the period from 1903 to 1918 was unquestionably Monhegan's Golden Age of Art.

In the years following the First World War, and especially during the Great Depression, there were fewer artists making regular trips to paint the island. Most of the ones who did had their own island homes and were part of the larger island community. From 1920 through the end of the Second World War, two groups had a strong presence on the island. Most prominent were the painters who represent Monhegan's version of regionalism. Primarily landscape/seascape painters, their canvases often picture the island's working people -- fishermen rowing dories in rough seas, hauling nets, lugging their catch, or dragging skiffs along the small beach below the fish houses. These are bold, vigorous works that reflect the hardy self-reliance necessary for this life, which Rockwell Kent captured with the title of his painting Toilers of the Sea. Among the painters of the period, Andrew Winter and Jay Connaway each lived year-round on the island for many years, while Abraham J. Bogdanove and Alfred Fuller spent long seasons there each year. James Fitzgerald, who conveys similar subjects with a more modernist style, was also an island regular after 1925, although he did not make the island his primary home until 1942.

The other prominent artists during this period between the World Wars were a group of Philadelphia women who went to the island to spend their summers painting. Students from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, these women were well recognized and exhibited nationally during this period. Stoddard had arrived on the island in 1907, but Constance Cochrane, Isabel Cartwright, Mary Mason, and Mary Butler were among those who arrived between the wars. Stoddard was best known as a portrait painter, who painted many island residents, and the others often painted flower gardens and interiors, although they also did island panoramas and seascapes.

Following the Second World War, the art colony would see another major change. Once again, a group of New York artists, alive with enthusiasm about the new abstraction, would arrive on the island to create a level of excitement not unlike that of the Henri Circle. Something big was happening in American art, and they were a part of it. Many of them had studied with Hans Hofmann and some, such as Michael Loew and John Hultberg, were important members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Several, such as Joseph DeMartini and Zero Mostel, had New York studios around West 28th Street and spent their summers on Monhegan painting. Others such as Reuben Tam, Ted Davis, Alex Minewski, and the McCartins were also central to the Monhegan art community whose members got together often to sketch and talk art. This group, with a core of about two dozen and with others who visited occasionally, dominated the Monhegan art scene for over three decades. A few who were their students and friends, such as Frances Kornbluth, Larry Goldsmith, and Elena Jahn, still paint on Monhegan today.

Recently, changes on Monhegan, like those that have happened all along the Atlantic coast, have affected the nature of the art community. In the past six years, property values on Monhegan have tripled. A few artists, such as Don Stone and Jamie Wyeth, were fortunate enough to acquire houses many years ago. But for other dedicated artists it is extremely difficult to afford housing. The days are gone when young artists, bursting with determination and excitement about what was happening in American art, could go to the island and rent cottages for the season.

However, excited young artists are determined to experience what has inspired many of the giants of American art, and they find ways. Some go to the island and work in the seasonal hotels, which give them housing and food and allow them some time to paint. A few have found ways to stay year-round on the island working at various jobs, much like Rockwell Kent did nearly a century ago and Andrew Winter did half a century ago. Others have arranged to go for two or three weeks each summer to spend eight or ten or twelve hours a day painting, as a kind of working vacation from their lives inshore. These various artists sometimes paint together or sit around in the evening and talk art. Their conversations are every bit as animated and vigorous as conversations have always been among the island's artists.

For the past 15 years there has also been an artist residency program on Monhegan, in which each summer two Maine artists are selected to live on the island for five weeks simply to experience the island, free from their usual responsibilities. It has nourished the work of several artists and some of the former residents return from time to time to paint the island. Joseph Kievitt is among them.

The tradition of making art on Monhegan has been long and rich, and it appears that serious artists will find ways to keep that tradition alive and that the island's motifs will continue to be rendered through the experiences of artists from each new school of American art.

by Edward L. Deci