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John Sloan visited Gloucester for the first time in the summer of 1914
and returned every summer for the next four years. He rented the same red
cottage each year in East Gloucester, which he shared with other artists
from New York, including Stuart Davis and Paul Cornoyer.
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John Sloan, Sunflowers,
Rocky Neck, n.d. |
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On the side porch of the red cottage, East
Gloucester, left to right:
Seated: Stuart Davis, Paul Cornoyer, Agnes M. Richmond
Standing on ground: Dolly Sloan, F. Carl Smith, John
Sloan
Top row: Alice Beach Winter, Katherine Groschke, Paul
Tietjens.
Photograph by Charles Allen Winter, 1915 |
Sloan’s Cape Ann
summers came at an important time in his development as an artist. “My
first summer in Gloucester afforded the first real opportunity for
continuous work in landscape,” he wrote later, “and I really made the most
of it. Working from nature gives, I believe, the best means of advance in
color and design.”
His success is demonstrated by Sunflowers, Rocky Neck
which hangs at the Museum. Dogtown, Gloucester (1916) from the Museum’s
collection further illustrates the artist’s growing mastery of color and
composition in landscape.
The Museum’s Old Cone (Uncle Sam) (1914)
is representative of Sloan’s interest in people. It is an evocative
portrait of an old man, bearded and splendidly, if somewhat
unconventionally, attired.
Sloan apparently enjoyed the stimulation of having artist friends
around him. In commenting on Davis’s first visit in 1915, Sloan revealed
much about Davis and himself:
"One summer Stuart Davis and family shared the cottage. We went out
painting together. All of us interested in developing different
orchestrations of color on the palette. Stuart was just beginning to
assimilate ideas from the Nabis and Fauves. It was fascinating to see
him re-assemble things he saw in nature, sometimes finding a useful
house or tree behind him to include in the picture.....I did this myself
sometimes but in a less original way. Stuart had the finest sense of
proportion of any American modern artist. "
Davis was strongly influenced by Cubism, as his Gloucester work from
the 1930s clearly illustrates. He began rearranging things he saw on the Gloucester waterfront into
collage-like paintings and drawings. His new “architectural beauties”
included docks and piers, vessels and their rigging, fishing gear and
equipment, and even gas pumps.
The Museum has 25 Davis drawings which date from 1916 to the early
1930s. Davis did not return to Cape Ann after the 1930s, but those
Gloucester images lingered on in his work for decades.
Other frequenters of Sloan’s red cottage represented in the Museum’s
collection include Paul Cornoyer, Charles Allen Winter and Alice Beach
Winter.
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