Part 527: Thomas G. Moses’ Sketching Trip to Ogunquit, Maine, in 1905
I return to the life of Thomas G. Moses during 1905. In 1904, Moses joined the Salmagundi club while living in New York and in 1906 he joined the Palette & Chisel Club after returning to Chicago. The year in between Moses wrote, “I am getting the picture bug again, and I will have to do something in that line. My little success in New York had a good effect on me, but was not detrimental to my regular commercial activities. I will always keep them lively – that will always be my regular stand-by.”
Moses recorded that on “June 18th, after several months of intense hustling, Ella and I broke away for the east, going to Ogunquit for a sketching trip, all of which I have written in full in my ‘Ogunquit Trip.’” I have not located any of Moses’ travelogues to date, only the articles that he published in the Palette & Chisel club newsletter; the Ogunquit trip is missing. In 1905, the “Oak Park Leaves” reported, “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas G. Moses of Euclid avenue have gone to Ogunquit, Maine, where Mr. Moses will study and sketch the rock-bound coast” (24 June 1905, page 17).
Ogunquit was a small shipbuilding community in Maine located on the coast near the southern border of the state. The Abenaki people, native to Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine used the word “ogunquit” to describe the region. “Ogunquit” in the Alnombak language means “beautiful place by the sea.” After the arrival of the European colonists, many of the Abenaki tribes moved north into Canada. Today, the 2000 Abenakis live on two reservations near Quebec. There are 10,000 Abenaki descendants scattered throughout the New England region too.
The Ogunquit community fostered two schools of art: one by Charles Woodbury and the other by Hamilton Easter Field, a student’s of Woodbury’s.
Charles Herbert Woodbury (1864-1940) was born in Lynn, Massachusetts and studied art in Boston, becoming the youngest honoree of the Boston Art Club at the age of 17. In 1886, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He taught art while attending MIT, and opened his first art studio by 1887. He married one of his former students, Marcia Oakes and they travel together to Europe.
His artistic studies from January to June 1891 included attending the Académie Julian in Paris. He then explored the techniques of the modern Dutch painters in Holland before returning to the United States. Woodbury’s American winters were spent painting in Boston, while summers were occupied with painting scenes of the New England coast and Nova Scotia.
Woodbury eventually spent his summers in one particular location – Ogunquit, Maine. There he founded the Ogunquit Summer School of Drawing and Painting. He first visit to Ogunquit was in 1888. That summer, he rented a room at Captain Charles Littlefield’s “Ogunquit House” on Shore Road where he painted his first scenes of the Ogunquit River and wharves. At the time, the area was nothing more than a cluster of fishermen’s homes, yet Woodbury immediately recognized the potential for artists.
By 1896 Woodbury established his own studio in Perkins Cove, a picturesque inlet with colorful fishing boats. In 1898 he opened his “Ogunquit Summer School of Drawing and Painting.” It was later re-named “The Art of Seeing – Woodbury Course in Observation” by 1923. Woodbury taught at Ogonquit for thirty-six summers, enrolling between sixty and one hundred students in a six-week course of “painting and drawing from nature.” The course was divided into three parts, with a drawing course held in Boston, just prior to his summer move to Ogunquit every summer. The Ogunquit art school ran from approximately mid-July to mid-August and remained in continuous operation from 1898 until his death in 1940. The only exception was between 1917 and 1924 when Woodbury closed the school to work for the US government.
Woodbury and his students rendered realistic depictions of local life and the sea, rejecting the modernist innovations that were popular at the time. He taught his “art of seeing,” which emphasized subjectivity in art. In other words, he promoted how things seemed, rather than how they appeared – just like many theatrical settings during the nineteenth century. Woodbury believed that every student, no matter the degree of talent, could benefit from his drawing and painting courses. His schools attracted both professional and amateur artists alike.
Fundamental to Woodbury’s teaching methodology was his emphasis on the powers of observation and memory. He emphasized the importance of including motion into each composition. Woodbury also introduced the use of motion pictures as a teaching device by 1928. This was to facilitate his students comprehension of things and people in motion; creating quick and accurate sketches utilizing basic artistic principles. Seeing and understanding movement was fundamental to his artistic approach. He was known to say, “Paint in verbs, not nouns.” In Chicago, Moses commented on his own artistic approach in 1905, writing, “I will always keep them lively.”
Woodbury’s approach to marine painting shifted the traditional viewpoint, placing the composition midway over the waves. He was considered by some to be the greatest marine painter after Winslow Homer. Woodbury also published three books that defined his art education philosophy: Painting and the Personal Equation (1919); Observation: Visual Training Through Drawing: (1922); and The Art of Seeing (1925)
In addition to teaching at his own school in Ogunquit, Woodbury taught in Boston and at the Wellesley College. He was a visiting art professor at both Dartmouth College and the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in Chicago where he met Thomas Moses, prompted Moses to travel east for a sketching trip. Woodbury’s students came from as far away as California to study in Ogunquit, setting up their easels for plein-air painting. Moses had always been a plein-air painter, traveling throughout the United States since the 1880s to gather information for both his fine art works and painted settings for the stage.
Woodbury’s approach to seeing meshed with that of scenic artists who created stage settings. Whether creating a large-scale or small-scale compositions, each method was based on the art of seeing. As a “Chicago Sunday Tribune” article noted in 1892, scenic art of high grade was “only different from other studio art in its breadth – a mere question of scale” (Chicago Sunday Tribune, Dec, 18, 1892, page 41).
The same year that Moses passed away, Woodbury’s art school brochure noted, “If the few who create and the many who appreciate have a common basis of training in the value of things seen, felt and heard, the gap between life and the arts will be filled and the gain be as great to the general education as to the artist.” He desperately hoped to establish “a universal graphic language,” where art was an essential part of everyone’s life.
To be continued…
