Political cartoon from the May 3, 1888 “Weekly Freeman” showing the plight of Irish tenants evicted from their homes.
Snow Scenes of New England on View at The Cahoon Museum of American Art
COTUIT, MASS. – The Cahoon Museum of American Art is welcoming the holidays with the exhibition “Winter Wonderland: Snow Scenes of New England,” November 13 through December 29. It will feature works by nearly 70 artists of the past and present with landscapes that might adorn a Christmas card.
George Henry Durrie, a foremost Nineteenth Century American painter of snow scenes, is represented by “The Wood Sled,” an 1854 piece picturing a logger heading home along a snowy path with an ox-drawn sled of logs.
The comforts of home in winter are also expressed in Currier & Ives 1861 print “Winter Morning,” an idyllic scene of a farmhouse and farmyard; William Paskell’s “Out in the Cold,” in which a lone traveler passes by a roadside home at twilight; and Dale Nichols’ 1942 painting “Coming to Sunday Dinner.”
Daniel Santry’s painting of a deserted mill in Franconia, N.H., was probably painted after the blizzard of 1892 left it encrusted with snow. In Anthony Cirono’s 1898 “City Hall at Christmas,” the lights of Providence flicker through a swirling snowfall. “Winter Wonderland” also includes works by the important Impressionists J. Alden Weir and Theodore Wendell.
Among the artists who painted the New England of yesteryear are several with Cape Cod ties, including Gerrit A. Beneker, Harold Brett, Charles D. Cahoon, Arthur V. Diehl, Harold Dunbar, Dodge Macknight, Ross Moffett, E. Ambrose Webster and George Yater. Falmouth native Aldro T. Hibbard’s extraordinary talent for capturing the texture of snow is clear from “Ice Harvest,” a painting that shows men sawing blocks of ice from a pond for use in icehouses and iceboxes.
About 20 contemporary pieces by New England artists will be on view and participating Cape artists are Peter Coes, William R. Davis, Lois Griffel, Marieluise Hutchin-son, Jane Lincoln, Simie Maryles, Elizabeth Mumford, Rosebee, Curtis Rosser, Jan Collins Selman, Jayne Shelley-Pierce, Nancy Whorf and Karol Wyckoff.
One gallery will be filled with winter scenes by the primitive artists Ralph and Martha Cahoon, for whom the museum is named. Visitors will be able to see Ralph Cahoon’s spoof of the famous Currier & Ives lithograph “The Road – Winter” paired with the actual print.
The Museum is open 10 am to 4 pm, Tuesdays through Saturdays. More information from 508-428-7581.
