Trail Site #8 : 47 Rocky Neck Avenue
DIRECTIONS: From the Martha Walter Studio site, continue walking down Rocky Neck Avenue
past the Rocky Neck Accommodations and along Smith Cove to #47.
The house at 47 Rocky Neck Avenue occupies the spot of Frederick Mulhaupt’s final studio in Gloucester. He occupied the building overlooking Smith Cove from 1932 until his death in 1938. His widow lived thereafter and maintained it much as he had left it for the next 23 years, until her death in 1974. Here she sold accumulated works from his studio, some of the most beautiful harbor paintings done by an artist in Gloucester.
Born in Rock Port, Missouri, in 1871, Mulhaupt studied art in Kansas City, MO, before moving to Chicago in the early 1890s. Following a decade there studying and eventually teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1904, and later that decade painted in Paris and at St. Ives on the Cornish coast of England, absorbing and practicing the tenets of impressionism that so informed his later Gloucester work. Mulhaupt first visited Cape Ann c. 1907. He began a pattern of summers in Gloucester and winters in New York until permanently settling in Gloucester in 1922. A decade later he and his family moved from 209 Main Street to Rocky Neck.
He was renowned for his Gloucester Harbor paintings, done both ‘en plein air’, and in the studio. When asked what appealed to him about Gloucester in light of all the exotic places he’d been, he modestly stated that it “duplicates any view I care to paint.” He was particularly adept at capturing winter light and effects. Mulhaupt has been called “Dean of the Cape Ann School” of artists, and no finer an artist than Emile Gruppé called him “a cut above the rest of us. He could paint rings around us.”
