Expeditions in art
Experience national art landmarks in some of Maine’s most scenic places.
The choir loft at the South Solon Meeting House offers a panoramic view of the frescoes, including Bill King’s treatment of Genesis and Exodus on the pulpit wall, and the remarkable ceiling designed by Edwin Brooks, featuring what he termed a “transcendental God-head.” Photo: Jessica Skwire Routhier
By Jessica Skwire Routhier
Rainy days provide a perfect opportunity to visit one of Maine’s many wonderful museums. But even the most ardent art lover can find it hard to justify spending a sunny summer day indoors. Luckily, it’s not always necessary to choose. Scattered throughout the state are special places where art and adventure intersect: utterly unique destinations where culture vultures and outdoor adventurers can see national art landmarks while experiencing Maine’s unmatched natural beauty.
The Winslow Homer Studio. Photo courtesy of Portland Museum of Art.
It’s not just today’s visitors and day-trippers who might seek a combined experience of art and nature. For well over a century, artists have sought out remote Maine spots that offer the solitude they need to work while also inspiring them with dramatic scenery. Maine is home to many such places, past and present, but two have been specially honored by inclusion in the Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program (artistshomes.org), an initiative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. All the properties in the program offer public access to places where notable artists have lived and worked. In Maine, these include the Winslow Homer Studio on Prouts Neck in Scarborough and the Rockwell Kent-James Fitzgerald Home and Studio on Monhegan Island.
In 1882, the extended family of the renowned painter, Winslow Homer, built a large summer cottage on Prouts Neck, intending to spend summers together where the Atlantic pummels the rocky coast. In 1883, Homer apparently decided that togetherness had its limits, and he called on his friend, the architect John Calvin Stevens, to remake the home’s carriage house into a private art studio. Since 2010, the Winslow Homer Studio has been owned and managed by the nearby Portland Museum of Art, which offers visitors the chance to see the place where Homer painted the majestic Maine seascapes that earned him a lasting international reputation. They can even climb out on the balcony where Homer watched the waves crashing against the coast.
Diana Greenwold, the PMA’s curator of American art, observes, “[his] ability to visualize the monumental forces of the natural world around him make Homer’s late-career marine paintings some of the best known works in American art and make the opportunity to experience that landscape a unique one for appreciators of Homer’s art.”
Visitors must register in advance for studio tours, which are by bus only and are offered April through October. But those lucky enough to be staying nearby at the Black Point Inn or a summer rental can make free use of Marginal Way, the public walking path that winds along the rocky shore of the neck and offers unimpeded views of both the studio and the ocean vista that appears in so many of Homer’s paintings.
Homer’s artistic refuge was remote for its time but still only a few miles from Portland, Maine’s primary population center. When modernist painter Rockwell Kent sought to put down roots in Maine, he consciously chose a place that was far away from such amenities. After his first visit to Monhegan Island, twelve miles off the coast, Kent “just fell in love,” said Robert Stahl, director of the Fitzgerald Legacy, in a recent interview. Stahl works with the Monhegan Museum of Art and History to manage the Rockwell Kent-James Fitzgerald Home and Studio, Maine’s second and only other property to receive the Historic Artists’ Homes designation.
Interior of the Kent-Fitzgerald Studio, with paintings by James Fitzgerald on the easel and above the original fireplace. Photo courtesy of Fitzgerald Legacy.
An art colony was already well established on Monhegan by the time of Kent’s first visit, with artists drawn to the island’s dramatic, rocky headlands, its picturesque village and the looming monolith of the uninhabited Manana Island framing the far side of the harbor. But Kent was one of the first artists to live there year-round, experiencing the harsh winters as well as the sparkling summer days. A skilled carpenter, he built his own home and studio and, when he finally left the island for good after World War II, he sold the studio to his friend, the painter James Fitzgerald.
For both artists, Stahl says, Monhegan is “where they created some of their finest work,” and visiting the buildings, which are nestled into Monhegan’s unique ecosystem, enables visitors “to experience the interplay between the raw beauty of the island and the creative process of these artists.” Guided tours include both buildings – which contain artwork by Kent and Fitzgerald and original furnishings – and a short hike through the interior lanes of the island that casual visitors rarely see. (Monhegan is know for its strenuous hiking trails along the headlands.)
Transportation to the island is on your own; options include the Monhegan Boat Line (monheganboat.com), with three daily departures in the peak season leaving from Port Clyde, and the Hardy Boat Cruises’ Monhegan Island Ferry departing New Harbor twice daily (hardyboat.com).
Port Clyde offers a departure point for yet another Maine art adventure, with a no-less recognized artistic name. Wyeths by Water is a labor of love for Linda Bean, Maine’s foremost lobster entrepreneur and a scion of the famed L.L.Bean family, who has been close to Maine’s first family of painters for generations. Bean offers three different art tours, all focused on the Wyeth painters, from her 42-foot lobster boat that docks at Port Clyde.
Port Clyde’s Marshall Point lighthouse was featured in the movie, Forrest Gump. Photo courtesy of Linda Bean’s Maine Wyeth Gallery.
Motoring down the St. George River offers a glimpse of the Olson House, the building seen in Andrew Wyeth’s masterpiece, Christina’s World, from the water. A tour of the outlying islands shows the vantage point of major canvases by N.C. Wyeth, father of Andrew, and takes visitors past the home of Andrew’s widow, Betsy Wyeth, featured in Architectural Digest. And the “Cannibal Shore” tour ventures past Marshall Point Lighthouse, featured in the movie, Forrest Gump, to visit a rocky shore that is depicted in more than 100 paintings by both Andrew and N.C. Wyeth.
“Three generations have called the Midcoast their summer home, and some of their most important works were painted here,” says Ron Crusan, director of Bean’s Wyeth Gallery, an airy and peaceful space above the Port Clyde General Store. The gallery sells high-end, archival-quality prints of many Wyeth paintings, several of them capturing essentially the same views that are seen from the boat.
It’s one thing to see the Olson House, the setting of one of the most recognized American paintings of all time, from the water. It’s quite another to see it up close and personal, inside and out. Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World depicts the artist’s disabled neighbor, Christina Olson, lying on a grassy field in front of the home she shared with her brother, Alvaro, in Cushing.
The light-filled interiors of the Olson House are much as they were when the Olsons lived here and when Andrew Wyeth painted them. Photo: Sarah Swajkos – Damn Rabbit Photography
But for Wyeth, the subject of the painting was just as much the house as the woman. Wyeth said of the house, “I just couldn’t stay away from there,” noting a kind of kinship that he saw between himself, the Olsons and their home. “In the portraits of that house, the windows are eyes or pieces of the soul almost,” he said. “To me, each window is a different part of Christina’s life.”
Today, the Olson House is owned and operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, which offers bus tours from the museum to the site Memorial Day through Columbus Day. Visitors can not only experience the house from Christina’s viewpoint but can also tour the interior, where Wyeth based many of his other compositions, and learn about the Olsons and their saltwater farm.
Bernard Langlais, Local Girl, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York), in place at the Langlais Preserve. Photo courtesy of Douglas Smith.
Christina Olson is a presence in another Cushing art landmark: the Langlais Sculpture Preserve, established in 2015 in a collaboration between the Colby College Museum of Art, the Kohler Art Foundation and the Georges River Land Trust, which owns and operates the site. Here, a whimsical wooden sculpture of Olson is one of many that remain in place on the former property of sculptor Bernard “Blackie” Langlais.
A Maine native, born in Old Town, Langlais brought the longtime tradition of Franco woodcarving to the postwar New York art world. He returned to Maine in the mid-1960s, playing a leadership role at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and completing multiple commissions for his distinctive outdoor sculpture – the most famous is probably Skowhegan’s 62-foot high Indian, still in place in the center of that town. He also created many smaller (but still huge) sculptures on his vast property in Cushing, and after the death of his widow, Helen, the property opened to the public. Visitors can now hike through the estate – any day, dawn to dusk, year- round – and admire the sculptures in their natural setting.
Annette Naegel, director of conservation at the land trust, calls the Langlais Preserve “a gem in our portfolio of properties,” noting, “It’s rather unique for a local land trust to own an artist’s estate.” While Langlais’s actual home and studio still stand and are open to visitors on summer weekends, Naegel cautions that the experience is “very different from a museum or a visitors’ center or a gift shop.” With a mission that is at least as much about ecology as it is art, the Langlais Preserve offers a uniquely unmanaged art adventure experience. “We’re using what’s there,” says Nagel, “including the inspiration and the art opportunity that Langlais presented by using materials on his property and using the connection between art and nature.”
There is something authentically Maine about letting art, history, and nature speak for themselves, providing visitors with unfettered and largely unmediated access. At the South Solon Meeting House, several miles through deep woods beyond where Langlais’s Skowhegan Indian still stands, the door is famously always unlocked, not just in the summertime but all year round. The area north of Skowhegan is better known for more standard Maine adventures – whitewater rafting, skiing, ATVing – but outdoorsy types have every reason to add this under-recognized Maine art landmark to their agenda.
The road from downtown Skowhegan to the meeting house is narrow, scarred with frost heaves and thickly forested with pine trees on either side. The modest white church, nondenominational since its original construction in 1842, appears suddenly at what’s now a quiet crossroads. A firm push on the right-hand door, and the visitor is immediately rewarded with a bloom of color that encompasses the entire interior space, walls and ceiling, glowing with the natural light from the large glass windows. Every surface is covered with vivid fresco paintings that depict scenes from the Old and New Testaments.
The frescoes are the result of a remarkable initiative by the nearby Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture begun in 1952, when the school was still in its infancy. The school had initiated classes in traditional buon fresco painting – created in place on wet plaster. A student and supporter, one Tiffany Blake, became aware of the then-unadorned meeting house nearby and proposed that it might be a site for permanent fresco installations. Several competitions were held over the succeeding years, systematically covering every inch of wall. Frescoes were designed and painted by artists including Sigmund Abeles, Ashley Bryan, Bill King, Henry Varnum Poor and, a personal favorite, Judith Shuman, whose view of Noah’s ark shows the moment when the dove, carrying a twig from an olive tree, returns to the ark as a sign that the flood has ended.
Ashley Bryan’s expressive fresco depicting scenes from the Gospel of Mark is a highlight of the South Solon Meeting House’s murals. Photo: Jessica Skwire Routhier.
“I think of it as a kind of sanctuary,” says Barbara Sullivan, a fresco painter and teacher herself, who is associated both with the Skowhegan School and with the South Solon Historical Society, which owns and manages the meeting house. “It’s quite a remarkable building, and I’ve used it as kind of a teaching place for fresco stuff,” she adds, pointing out how a close look at the walls reveals both giornato lines – the edges of a day’s worth of fresh plaster – and pounce marks – pinholes in the plaster that reveal where artists transferred their designs from paper to wall.
For a completely unmanaged Maine art adventure, one more destination warrants at least a brief mention. From Rockland, also the jumping-off point for the Olson House, ferries run regularly to the islands of North Haven and Vinalhaven. They are aptly named since both were, at different points in history, havens for several important artists.
American impressionist Frank Weston Benson had a summer home, Wooster Farm, on North Haven for thirty years, beginning in 1901. There he painted memorable, light-infused studies of his daughters against the incomparable backdrop of island scenery. Wooster Farm is still standing, as are the nearby cottages that belonged to sculptor Bella Lyon and painter Beatrice Whitney Van Ness. There are no formal guided tours, but folks at the North Haven Historical Society or North Haven Conservation Partners – which maintains a series of trails throughout the island – can point them out to interested visitors.
North Haven is also the ancestral home of contemporary artist Eric Hopkins, renowned for his aerial coastal paintings that show the curve of the earth over the coast. The gallery and shop on Hopkins Wharf sells reproductions of Hopkins’ popular paintings; originals can be found back on the mainland at the artist’s gallery in Rockland.
Vinalhaven has also been home to many artists, past and present, but it is most closely associated with pop art legend Robert Indiana, best known for his iconic “LOVE” composition. Like Langlais, Indiana quit the rat race of the New York art world at the height of his career, settling on Vinalhaven around 1969 in a former International Order of Odd Fellows lodge known as the “Star of Hope.” Growing increasingly reclusive, Indiana lived at the Star of Hope until his death last year, when the fate of the building and his large estate of artworks became the subject of much publicity and controversy. Indiana’s home is not currently accessible to the public, but it’s hard to miss in the center of Vinalhaven’s small downtown, where its tall windows, mansard roof and fenced-in widow’s walk loom over the island townscape.
At present, the building stands more as a relic of a bygone era than a lasting monument to Maine art. But this was once true of the Homer Studio and the Kent-Fitzgerald House, too, as well as the other destinations featured here. For generations, long before they were professionally owned and managed, people sought them out and told their stories, conveying through word of mouth the rare landmarks that they are.
In the meantime, the inheritors of Indiana’s estate have announced plans to turn Indiana’s home into a museum dedicated to his work. While those plans are still in their infancy, there is every reason to hope that one day the Star of Hope will take its place in Maine’s constellation of off-the- beaten track art adventures.
WINSLOW HOMER STUDIO
portlandmuseum.org/studiotour | 207-775-6148
KENT-FITZGERALD HOME AND STUDIO
monheganmuseum.org | jamesfitzgerald.org | 207-596-7003
WYETHS BY WATER
lindabeansmainewyethgallery.com/wyeths-by-water | 207-372-6600
OLSON HOUSE
farnsworthmuseum.org/collection/olson-house-2/ | 207-596-6457
LANGLAIS SCULPTURE PRESERVE
georgesriver.org/langlais-sculpture-preserve | 207-594-5166
SOUTH SOLON MEETING HOUSE
southsolonmeetinghouse.org
