This weekend I’d like you join me on a trip to one of the oldest artist’s colonies in America, and once one of it’s busiest ports, the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts, just over thirty miles (50 km) north-east of Boston. Its large natural harbour has been painted by a succession of many of the greatest American landscape artists since the middle of the nineteenth century, and my selection of their works in this weekend’s two articles is a potted history of modern painting styles.

This map of the Cape Ann peninsula from 1893 shows the areas that you’ll see pictured, around Gloucester Harbor that encloses Ten Pound Island to the south of the city, surrounding beaches, and as a finale to tomorrow’s article, the old abandoned settlement of Dogwood in the hills to the north.

It was local artist Fitz Henry Lane who first started painting the coast here, in the first half of the nineteenth century. His early style steadily evolved through paintings like this of Gloucester Harbor from 1850 as he increasingly explored the effects of light and atmosphere.

By about 1860, when Lane painted Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor, this had reached Luminism, an approach allied with the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement.

In the summer of 1873, the aspiring Boston artist Winslow Homer visited, at a critical time in his career. He was in the process of making watercolour his preferred medium, and abandoning work as an illustrator, to devote his time to landscape painting.

This matching pair of watercolour (above) and oil (below) versions of the same motif demonstrate his skill in both.

Perhaps as a result of his visit to France, many of Homer’s paintings during the 1870s showed very loose brushwork, and greater emphasis on markmaking than previously. At first the critics were disparaging of his watercolours, but they were popular and sold well. He also developed and often used a wide range of techniques to enhance his watercolours. These included the use of both transparent and opaque watercolour, thin layered washes, scraping, texture, resist, splattering, and even abrasive paper.

In the late 1870s Homer became more reclusive, lived in Gloucester, and at one time in Eastern Point Lighthouse, before he travelled to England, where he lived and painted in the coastal village of Cullercoats in 1881-82.

Willard Metcalf, an American Impressionist who was born near Boston, visited and painted Gloucester Harbour in 1895. This is his view of Smith Cove in East Gloucester, looking towards its inner harbour, with the town itself on the opposite shore. It’s a superb set-piece of what had been a couple of decades earlier the busiest port in the USA. With the rapid decline of sail at the end of the nineteenth century, though, it was slowly returning to a quieter existence, with its supporting industries reducing.

In about 1899, Metcalf’s contemporary Frederick Childe Hassam, another American Impressionist, visited and painted Gloucester Inner Harbor. Hassam had also been born in Boston, and like Homer had been a successful illustrator before visiting Europe in 1883.

Frank Duveneck had been born in Kentucky and joined the German community in Cincinnati, Ohio, before studying alongside William Merritt Chase in Munich, Germany. When he returned to the USA, he found first success in Boston. Later in his career, he spent his summers in and around Gloucester, where he painted his Horizon at Gloucester (c 1905), showing the port’s distinctive skyline from Eastern Point.

The Yellow Pier Shed (c 1910) is another of Duveneck’s summer paintings of Gloucester’s harbour.

Curiously, in his final years he painted several views of Brace’s Rock (c 1916), off Eastern Point, Gloucester. Fitz Henry Lane had done the same shortly before his death.

This weekend I’m visiting the coast of Maine, the small state tucked away at the north-eastern extremity of the US. Although its climate may not be ideal for plein air work, its 230 miles (400 km) of ocean coastline include some of the most beautifully rugged on the North Atlantic. It has attracted many of the major landscape artists from the eastern cities, from Thomas Cole, born in Bolton, England, and raised in Ohio, to George Bellows, also born and raised in Ohio.

In these two articles, I show some of my favourite paintings of the Maine coast. This first concentrates on artists active in the nineteenth century, starting with Cole and ending with Winslow Homer. Tomorrow’s sequel features paintings by Childe Hassam and George Bellows, with a single work by Robert Henri, largely from the twentieth century.

As few of us are likely to recognise any of the locations named for these paintings, here’s Maine’s entry in the National Atlas of the United States (1997).

Generally accepted as the founder of the Hudson River School, many of Thomas Cole’s landscapes were painted in the Catskill Mountains in the south-east of New York state. In 1845, he travelled north-east to Maine, where he painted this View Across Frenchman’s Bay From Mt. Desert Island, After A Squall.

This island, larger than Martha’s Vineyard, for instance, is part of the archipelago stretching along much of the Maine coast, and now contains Acadia National Park, a popular tourist location. Cole shows this view as a squall is moving on, the wind and sea still showing its effects. It’s likely that Cole’s student Frederic Edwin Church was with him there.

Fitz Henry Lane was born in the port of Gloucester, MA, and made his career painting marine views in New England. His view Off Mount Desert Island from 1856 shows the same island in more peaceful weather, with a ship at anchor, its sails limp in the calm.

Frederic Edwin Church was another New Englander, best known for his huge and amazingly detailed panoramic landscapes of Central and South America. He had settled in New York by 1850, and seems to have taken trips most summers to the wilds of Maine to paint en plein air in oils. He painted this sparse view of Mt. Desert Island, Maine Coast in oils on paper in 1850.

The following year, Church returned to paint this rich twilight seascape of a Beacon, off Mount Desert Island (1851).

Church made his first visit to South America in 1853. I’m not sure whether he painted Schoodic Peninsula from Mount Desert at Sunrise (1850–55) before or after that trip, but it contrasts with the highly detailed and complex views he made of The Andes of Ecuador (1855), and similar later works. This peninsula is the section of mainland to the east of Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island.

Church’s Eagle Lake Viewed from Cadillac Mountain, Mount Desert Island, Maine (1850–60) is a slightly later painting featuring a considerably more complex motif. Cadillac Mountain is relatively low, at 466 metres (1,530 feet), the highest point of Mt Desert Island, and affords spectacular views such as this, looking north-west from the east side of the island.

Alfred Thompson Bricher (1837–1908) was one of the last artists of the Hudson River School, and studied with Albert Bierstadt. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on its border with Maine, many of his best works are coastal landscapes. Although he lived in Staten Island, New York, at some stage he travelled up to paint this tranquil view On the Coast of Maine.

Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) was a latecomer to landscape painting, but made a speciality of painting coastal salt marshes in New England, before moving to Florida in 1883. In 1877, he seems to have made his way to the southern edge of Maine, to paint a stretch of marsh near the new tourist resort of York Harbor, Coast of Maine, to the north-east of Portsmouth. This is a marked contrast to the rough and rocky coast further north and east.

After Church, the landscape painter most strongly associated with the Maine coast was Winslow Homer. Born in Boston, his formative periods were spent on the coast. During the 1870s, he started painting in watercolour around Gloucester, Massachusetts, then spent 1881-82 developing his art further in Cullercoats, a fishing community in north-east England.

Shortly after his return from England, Winslow Homer moved to Prouts Neck in Scarborough, on the coast south of Portland, Maine. This was rapidly becoming a summer seasonal resort, and Homer’s new studio was only twenty-five metres/yards from the sea, overlooking Cannon Rock. His Incoming Tide, Scarboro, Maine (1883) (above) is a typical watercolour from this period, with Breaking Storm, Coast of Maine (1894) (below) demonstrating his versatility in technique.

Apart from the fashions, The Outlook, Maine Coast (1894) could have been one of his superb watercolours from Cullercoats over a decade earlier.

This oil painting of Cannon Rock from 1895 is more of a puzzle. It shows the rock just outside his studio at Prouts Neck, that he was greatly familiar with. Homer has a deserved reputation for careful realism that at times seems almost documentary. Yet the impressive breaker shown here could only have occurred when the tide was low; the inlet in the foreground shows that, in that part of the painting at least, the tide was high, not low. Perhaps even Winslow Homer took a little artistic licence at times.

Homer’s wonderful twilight view of West Point, Prout’s Neck (1900) sees us into the twentieth century, and the new generation of artists to paint the coast of Maine.

In the first of these two articles, I showed paintings illustrating school life from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, a period of more than two centuries when few artists painted the inside of the classroom. This changed from 1850, although the theme still failed to attract the best-known painters.

Albert Anker, father of Swiss painting and known for his large output of ‘genre scenes’, probably painted more classrooms than any other. He painted The Village School in 1848 nearly half a century afterwards, in 1896, presumably from his own recollection of his final year at school in Neuchâtel. Compared to earlier paintings, this classroom is packed, relatively orderly, and well-equipped with benches and desks, even though the children are shabbily dressed, indicating their poverty.

Anker’s earlier painting of The School Exam from 1862 shows a more contemporary scene. It’s not clear whether the pupils are undergoing examination, or the school is. Three of them seen standing out at the front are so poor that they cannot afford shoes at all, but effort is at last being put into their education.

Winslow Homer is perhaps the most famous painter to have made more than one work showing The Country School, believed to be of a country schoolroom in the Catskills, New England. This painting, dated 1871, is the first of a series of three or more showing the same largely empty classroom, with its impossibly wide age range. Two of the boys reading to the teacher are too poor for shoes, although the girls on the right look much better-dressed.

Following the collapse of the Second Empire during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Third Republic targeted education for special development. Schools in France had earlier been largely run by the Catholic Church, but from 1833 communes had been required to provide schools for boys but not girls. The anti-clerical Minister for Public Instruction, Jules Ferry, introduced laws in 1881 to establish free education throughout the country, even for girls, and progressively replaced existing Catholic schools with the modern Republican School through the 1880s.

François Bonvin’s The Scholar of 1874 is one of a few paintings showing individual pupils in the classroom. This boy has been granted the privilege of his own desk, at the front of the class, and is working on after the end of the school day. The teacher’s hat and coat are draped over his desk, ready for when this pupil completes his extra work.

Jean-Baptiste Jules Trayer’s wonderful watercolour of A Breton Infants School from 1882 predates any celebration of the Republican policy: the crucifix high on the wall at the right shows that this is one of the older Catholic schools. It shows a teacher helping one of her students with writing, in a class entirely wearing traditional Breton costume. There’s clearly room for improvement, though, as one girl is sleeping on her book, doubtless exhausted from her early morning work on the family farm.

Rising standards of schooling were also reaching out to some of the more remote communities in Nordic countries. Oscar Björck’s painting of Madam Henriksen’s School for Girls in Skagen from 1884 shows a tiny and personal class in this small, isolated community at the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland), home to a major artists’ colony and birthplace of Danish Impressionism.

Then, in the mid 1880s, something remarkable happens to paintings of the schoolroom in France: they become strikingly photographic in their reality, with the advent of Naturalism.

Within two years of the early death of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes’ In the Classroom (1886) looks as if it may have been painted from photographs. One boy, staring intently at the teacher in front of the class, is caught crisply, pencil poised in his hand. Beyond him the crowd of heads becomes more blurred.

Jean Geoffroy’s Primary School Class from 1889 doesn’t give us the same depth of field effect, but shows one of the Republic’s new lay teachers working diligently in the classroom with her pupils. They’re still a bit of a shower, with the younger ones at the back working on traditional slates, but this is the public face of the modern Republican School.

In Geoffroy’s In School from about 1900, another lay teacher in a modern Republican infants class is caring for the French men and women of the future.

Of course France wasn’t the only country to be improving its educational system at this time. Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s Mental Arithmetic. In Public School of S. A. Rachinsky from 1895 shows a class of poor students in the village of Tatev in Smolensk province, at the western edge of the Russian Empire in central eastern Europe. They were fortunate enough to have a pioneering educator as their local teacher.

Sergey Rachinsky had been a professor of botany in Moscow until 1867, when he abandoned academic life to run the village school in Tatev. The elderly professor is seen with his students working on a challenging mental arithmetic problem. The teacher died in 1902.

My final painting, by the Ukrainian artist Max Silbert, shows a Singing Lesson in a School in Holland in 1907, and is a fascinating chance discovery. Although its realism isn’t as detailed or photographic as the French paintings from the 1880s above, it shows a similar photographic depth of field effect. The pupils closest to the artist are shown in sharp focus, and those in the further distance are markedly blurred. It’s impossible to tell whether this results from Silbert painting this work from photographs with the same blurring, or it was a deliberate effect introduced by the artist to give it a photographic look.