WEST JONES ADVISORS

Frank Swift Chase, Dean of the Nantucket Art Colony

In the early twentieth century Nantucket’s whaling wharves inspired a generation of artists who transformed the island’s identity from an economic hub dependent on the sea to a haven for the arts. The Nantucket art colony came to life in the 1920s among the shacks, shanties, boathouses, and other old buildings that were the relics of the island’s long-vanished whaling past. Florence Lang, a Nantucket summer resident and native of Montclair, New Jersey, began converting many of these wharf shacks into studio spaces to rent to artists in the summer months. 

In 1924, she opened the Easy Street Gallery, converting an old cooper’s shop into the island’s first modern art gallery. Soon, a group of artists, known as the “waterfront artists,” came together to study with Frank Swift Chase, the painter and teacher who arrived in 1920 and would become the “dean of Nantucket artists.”

Frank Swift Chase served as the Nantucket Art Colony’s master painter and teacher, offering “Classes in Landscape Painting” to a generation of artists. Chase painted “en plein air” at favorite outdoor settings across Nantucket’s moors, hill-tops and beaches. He employed quick, expressive brushwork to create fresh, impressionistic views of quintessential Nantucket settings, often while leading classes or groups of artists in the field. 

As exemplified beautifully in View of Nantucket from Monomoy, Chase favored subdued grays, blues, lavenders, and browns, frequently employing the wet-into-wet technique he taught his students and using a heavily loaded brush and occasionally a palette knife, which created thick and choppy strokes. 

Chase showed his work regularly in the Easy Street Gallery shows in August, at the Candle House Gallery, at his studios, and, starting in 1945, at the Kenneth Taylor Galleries. Upon his death in 1958, the local Inquirer and Mirror eulogized the longtime guiding spirit of the art colony: “For many years his group of eager students benefited by his sound guidance, his encouragement, and his understanding of each individual’s needs. His own painting had fine solidity and a poetic feeling for the beauty of nature.”

William Newton Bartholomew (American, 1822-1898)

Boston-born artist William Newton Bartholomew visited Nantucket for a period around 1890, drawn like his friend Henry S. Wyer to the dilapidated beauty of Nantucket’s past, with winding streets that “wriggle about from one to another just as they please” and “queer-shaped gray old houses shingled from ridge-pole to the ground.” Bartholomew skillfully captured the ramshackle beauty and charm of the island’s picturesque views in a series of watercolors that capture the fading glory of the island at the end of the century.