Research Trip, Post #2: Cornish

My favorite American artist, Thomas Dewing, painted "Spring" on the left with Mt. Ascutney in the background. On the right, you can see the mountain from the loggia of Saint Gaudens's studio. It's possible that Dewing set up his models (who were usually friends in Cornish) in the field here.

On the first weekend of my research trip, I had a chance to do some sightseeing in New Hampshire. I've been wanting to visit Cornish, N.H. for years now. I first discovered that there had once been an artist colony there when I did a research paper in 2004 on Maxfield Parrish. Parrish was an illustrator and painter who studied here in Philadelphia and later spent his summers with a group of artists in Cornish. That group was led by a sculptor named Augustus Saint Gaudens and also included a group of artists whose work I got to know well when I worked at the Smithsonian--Thomas Dewing, Frank Benson, Kenyon Cox, Paul Manship, Willard Metcalf, and Daniel Chester French, to name just some of the artists. There work was part of the "American Renaissance" and incorporated classical influences.

The artists living in Cornish often gathered at Saint Gaudens' house and gardens. That's where a friend and I visited--it's the only one of the artists' houses open to the public--on the first weekend of my research trip to New England. These artists put on a masque, a performance similar to a play, in a field behind Saint Gaudens house in June 1905. I discovered that the classical structure that served as the setting for the masque is still there.




More pics are up at my Flickr stream.