The Rocky Neck Historic Art Trail takes you to fifteen sites of art historical significance in one of America’s most visually arresting locales. Rocky Neck is a granite promontory with tide flats and wharf buildings separating the harbor proper from Smith’s Cove in Gloucester, Massachusetts. With its scenic views and humble waterfront buildings, this spit of land measuring less than one square mile has since the early 19th century beckoned a steady stream of painters, sculptors and writers to its picturesque shores. Regarded by many to be “America’s Oldest Working Art Colony,” the artists’ enclave at Rocky Neck during the period from 1850 to 1950 attracted a number of the most important realist painters in the annals of American art.
By mapping the sites where they worked, lived and became inspired, the Rocky Neck Historic Art Trail enables you to walk in the footsteps of Winslow Homer, Fitz Henry Lane, Augustus Buhler, Frank Duveneck, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper and a host of other pioneering American artists, and to see first-hand the iconic land and seascapes that gave rise to their illustrious artistic output. It is hoped that, by enabling you to identify where historical artistic events took place and to see them in the context of what remains today, the Trail documents will ensure you make the most of your visit to one of the special places in the history of American art.
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Summer Outward Bound, (detail) Gloucester, 1931, oil on board, Cape Ann Museum, bequest of Robert L. French, 2009.