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John Sloan and Stuart Davis were friends and artists working in and around Gloucester during the early part of the 20th century. Sloan's Cape Ann paintings are remarkable for their color and vibrancy, and demonstrate his interest in figures like Van Gogh. Davis, perhaps a little more radically, favored the geometrics of Cubism.
John Sloan
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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 |
A leading light of the Ashcan school of realists, 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.
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 Cape Ann Museum. Dogtown, Gloucester (1916) from the Museum’s Fine Arts Collection further illustrates the artist’s growing mastery of color and composition in landscape.
The Cape Ann 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.
John Sloan and Stuart Davis Friendship
John Sloan apparently enjoyed the stimulation of having artist friends
around him. In commenting on Stuart 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. "
Stuart Davis
An early American modernist, Stuart 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. In his bold Cape Ann paintings, his new “architectural beauties” included docks and piers, vessels and their rigging, fishing gear and equipment, and even gas pumps.
The Cape Ann Museum has 25 Stuart 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 John Sloan’s red cottage represented in the Cape Ann Museum’s Fine Arts Collection include Paul Cornoyer, Charles Allen Winter and Alice Beach Winter.
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