The Easy Street Gallery (1924-1943)

Located on the gentle curve of Easy Street between Steamboat Wharf and Old North Wharf where the Nantucket Railroad once ran, overlooking the Easy Street Basin, the legendary Easy Street Gallery dominated the art scene on Nantucket for nearly twenty years during the height of the early Art Colony. From its first season in 1924 until just before the formation of the Kenneth Taylor Galleries and the Artists Association of Nantucket in 1945, the Easy Street Gallery hosted annual exhibitions featuring the work of major, and minor, Art Colony artists, alongside works of visiting and itinerant painters.

The inspiration for the Easy Street Gallery came once more from Florence Lang, who, according to one critic, “made a study of the Art Colony at Provincetown.” When the Langs opened the gallery’s doors in 1924, the Inquirer and Mirror reported: “So beautifully has it been transformed into a really fine picture gallery…sky-lighted with a charming little mezzanine gallery overlooking the main one, it becomes a fine institution dedicated to the cause of Art.”

Exhibitions at the Easy Street Gallery were genteel affairs—only tea was served—in sharp contrast to the gallery scene that developed after the war, and to the more politicized air of some contemporary colonies. Shows at the Easy Street Gallery ran typically for the month of August, with exhibition rosters that included all of the major figures of the period: Frank Swift Chase and his remarkable corps of students—among them Anne Ramsdell Congdon, Ruth Haviland Sutton, Emily Hoffmeier, Elizabeth Saltonstall, Isabelle Tuttle, Gertrude Monaghan, and Harriet Lord–and other significant talents including Tony Sarg, Walter Gilman Page, Inna Garsoian, Henry S. Eddy, and Edgar Jenney. Prominent visiting artists such as Richard Hayley Lever and Volney A. Richardson also showed frequently. Hundreds of artists exhibited their work on the gallery’s walls in its twenty-year existence. The Easy Street Gallery represented the heart of the Art Colony at its peak.

 

Painting en plein air on Easy Street.