Around 13,000 years ago, as the big glaciers of the last ice age slowly melted and retreated back into the Arctic, they left behind a ragged collection of gashes, scars and prehistoric boulders that would become the New England coastline. When the first European settlers arrived at the rocky, windswept beaches and islands of Maine in the early 1600s, the landscape was that of jagged navigational hazards dotted with remote fishing camps.
400 years later, not much has changed, except now one of these rocks has become one of the country’s most renowned art colonies. Twelve nautical miles off of the mainland, Maine’s famous Monhegan Island has no cars, one schoolhouse, and a population of about 65 people, many of whom brought by the only two industries the island’s geography allows for – fishing and art.
Monhegan’s name comes from a word from the indigenous Abenaki people that means “out-to-sea island,” and the island’s history reflects that of a windswept rock out to sea in the North Atlantic. After the Abenaki, there were pilgrims and colonists, pirates and whalers, fur traders and lobster fishermen, painters like George Bellows and Edward Hopper, and now tourists from all over the world. The first American artist to arrive on Monhegan was Aaron Draper Shattuck, a painter from New Hampshire who studied in New York City in the 1850s. While on a trip to see the lighthouses of Maine, he came upon Monhegan and noted the “beautiful coves and grand cliffs rising high out of the sea.”
By the turn of the century, it had become a true destination for American painters, led by the trio of Bellows, Rockwell Kent, and Robert Henri, who worked there together during Monhegan’s Golden Age from 1903 until around World War I, often in conjunction with other painters of different styles, from watercolors to impressionism to traditional naturalistic landscapes. Paris may have had La Belle Epoch but America had a bunch of guys on a cold, windswept rock painting seagulls.
Words: Joseph Swide
Photographs: Field Mag and Julia Dean
the foggy spring months.
