'Sconset Art

Sconset has always kindled the aesthetic imagination of visitors and residents alike, with its nestled honeycomb of streets and lanes, its pilings of half-neglected fishing shacks turned houses, its quaint array of old characters and their odd belongings, its battered beachfront home to cod fishermen and bathers, and above all the strange and solitary majesty of Sankaty Head Light, a watchful eye beaming out into the Atlantic from the lonely promontory of the North Bluff. This little Eden on the sea, with the rose-covered charm of a village in the mist, and the raw beauty of a mirage at the edge of the world, has attracted artists of varying talents to capture its abundant graces.

The earliest artistic depiction of 'Sconset occurs in David Augustus Leonard's 1797 engraving A View of Siasconset— A Fishing Village on Nantucket, published in conjunction with his humorous and obscure ballad The Laws of Siasconset. Long considered something of a fantasy, it is now seen (if one takes out the masts of whaleships on the horizon added in a modern reprint) as a reasonably accurate portrayal of the seasonally active fishing village that functioned as the "fishbasket" of the island.

The real heyday of 'Sconset art begins with the island's post-1870 rebirth as a resort destination. Although it often appears that the island chrysalis exploded quietly on its own, it was really the result of vigorous promotion, entrepreneurship, scheming, and advertisement. The result was that many off-island artists were alerted to the scenic possibilities of an undiscovered place of beauty, and also to the touristic clientele who would purchase their works.

Ambitious canvases by prominent visiting artists like Wendell Macy and W. Ferdinand Macy were hardly the norm for 'Sconset scenery, which tended to have a more folksy and local charm. Countless hands portrayed the scene of Pump Square, which, as the center of village life in the period, represented the old-fashioned norms of 'Sconset, with its communal, almost medieval, focus on the ancient (by American standards) drinking well that nourished man and beast in the midst of cozy cottages. Lincoln Ceely's painting 'Sconset Pump (ca. 1920) is one of the last in this folk tradition. Many artists would follow in those steps, in the attempt to capture in the permanence of their art all that was quaint, lovely, and fading in 'Sconset.

The iconography of the village was fixed by the early pioneers, and the village and its attractions have lost none of their charm—indeed, the whole of 'Sconset seems fixed in time, in spite of all of the changes that attend it every day. If any one was responsible for this permanence in the popular imagination, it was the artists and photographers who created the "timeless" 'Sconset of our dreams.

Broadway, 1918
Everett P. Clisby
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Bradford Brightman, Jr. of Vero Beach, Florida in memory of Mr. & Mrs. James Deacon of Nantucket.
2000.25.1

View of 'Sconset, 1879
Rev. L. W. Bostwick
Oil on board
Gift of Winifred M. Grandy
1979.18.1

Fishers' Huts, 'Sconset
John Robinson Tait (1834-1909)
Oil on canvas, 1880
Gift of the Friends of the NHA
1991.27.1

A digital exhibition by the Nantucket Historical Association