Before the Art Colony: 1870−1910s

In the 1870s, as the nation began to recover from the psychic wounds inflicted by the Civil War, Nantucket was slowly reinventing itself as a holiday destination. Much of the island’s appeal, in addition to its natural beauty and beaches, lay in the perception of it as a kind of living museum of the quaintness and charm of “old times”− of the simpler, preindustrial way of life that the war had destroyed. On Nantucket, this rustic charm was largely the effect of the demise of the great whaling era and the resulting islandwide depression that left much of the town, and the wharves in particular, wrapped in a ghostly aura of dereliction and decay.

Such a setting provided an ideal opportunity for postwar artists, who discovered in Nantucket a gallery of old seafaring characters, dilapidated houses and barns, shoreline wrecks, and a general atmosphere of the simplicity and faded glory of the past. Already a nationally known artist, Eastman Johnson purchased a home on Nantucket in the early 1870s and began to paint many of his masterworks, including The Old Stage Coach and The Cranberry Harvest − Island of Nantucket, using Nantucket settings and subjects. These works attracted national attention, and inspired an ever-increasing flow of artists to visit the unique gemlike island thirty miles at sea.

Many artists with Nantucket roots, including native genius James Walter Folger and Nantucket-descended Wendell Macy and William Ferdinand Macy, created impressive genre scenes capturing the spirit of the place. Most of those early artists were men, but as opportunities arose for women to receive formal artistic training in important centers of American art instruction such as the Art Students League in New York City, more and more women artists joined the pilgrimage. Some of them, like Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin, had Nantucket parentage; others, like Virginia Guild Sharp, married into Nantucket families; still others, like Annie Barker Folger, were born on the island. They all shared a fascination with the island’s physical beauty, its relics of the past, and the overall way of life that made Nantucket in the postwar era an ideal subject of their paintings.