The Vision of an Art Colony:

The step from a loose group of like-minded artists and friends working on Nantucket in the 1900s and 1910s to a self-conscious and self-styled “Art Colony” was made by one remarkable individual: Florence Lang, an amateur painter and patron of the arts from Montclair, New Jersey, and a Nantucket summer resident. In the late 1910s, Lang turned her eye upon the loose collection of old wharves that made up the Nantucket waterfront—the shacks, shanties, and boathouses from the island’s long-vanished whaling and fishing heyday, now idly soaking in the sea air. Out of those ghostly remains, Lang’s vision of a future Art Colony was born.

Beginning in 1917 with the purchase of South Wharf, Florence and her husband, Henry, bought large tracts of land along Washington Street Extension and South Beach, as well as portions of Commercial (Swain’s) Wharf and Easy Street. They converted the shacks that populated the wharf properties into modest but workable studios and offered them for rent in the summer months for reasonable rates, in the range of fifty to seventy dollars. Lang’s plan was to create a casual atmosphere that would allow visiting artists to experiment, share studio space, socialize, discuss their art, and embark on field trips to distant sketching spots.

In addition to the necessary studio spaces, Florence Lang also created Nantucket’s first art galleries, in the modern sense. In the early 1920s, she purchased a former spermaceti candlehouse at the foot of Commercial Wharf and turned the structure into the island’s first gallery—the Candle House Studio. Exhibitions at the Candle House included regular solo and group shows during the height of the summer. Many of Lang’s resident artists, known as the “waterfront artists,” exhibited here in the 1920s and beyond. With the success of the Candle House, another outworn structure caught Florence Lang’s eye: an old cooper’s shop that had been used as “Hayden’s Saltwater Bathhouse,” located near the Yacht Club. Lang purchased the building, moved it to Easy Street, and opened its doors in 1924 as the Easy Street Gallery, which immediately became the premier venue for the Nantucket Art Colony and continued to serve as its hub into the 1940s. Lang’s visionary developments set the stage for the future of the arts on the island, and created the necessary conditions for the emergence of Nantucket as an Art Colony.