We’re spending this weekend in the city of Gloucester, to the north-east of Boston, Massachusetts, in the company of some of the fine paintings of its harbour and coast. In the first of these two articles, I showed views from those of pioneer Fitz Henry Lane in 1850, up to Frank Duveneck in 1910.

To remind you of the location, here’s the map from 1893 again.

Louise Upton Brumback was a pupil of William Merritt Chase, friend and contemporary of Frank Duveneck. She learned to paint en plein air in Chase’s summer school on Long Island, before moving to live in Kansas City, Missouri. From 1909, the Brumbacks spent their summers in the artists’ colony of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the rest of the year in Manhattan; those summers were to prove her most productive seasons.

From the outset, Brumback’s paintings reflected her nature. Bathers Along the Shore (1910) is decidedly post-Impressionist, highly individual, colourful, and expressed in strong terms.

Gloucester, Massachusetts (1912) is an unusual view of part of what had been one of the USA’s busiest seaports.

In 1912 the Brumbacks had a house built for them in East Gloucester, and Louise started to exhibit more frequently, and much more successfully. By 1914, she showed paintings at the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC and in Boston, and had a solo show at the Fine Arts Institute in Kansas City. Her husband had been able to retire early from his legal practice, and devoted his time and effort to supporting her career.

With her more mature style, she became best-known for vibrantly colourful beach scenes, such as her Good Harbor Beach, showing the coast near Gloucester in 1915.

Her undated Good Harbor Gloucester was probably painted in the same, or an adjacent, summer.

Three Umbrellas (undated) features impasto across the beach, and unusual brushstrokes in the sky.

Even some of her later paintings have a primitive look about them, as in Grey Day Gloucester from 1920, with its boxy houses, relaxed perspective, and simple reflections.

Although I have only been able to obtain this monochrome image of her later view of Gloucester Harbour from about 1921, its details show a marked contrast. She died in Gloucester in 1929.

My last artist was another of Chase’s pupils, who was influenced by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists: the Modernist painter Marsden Hartley. Although more strongly associated with his native Maine, he too visited Gloucester.

Gloucester Fantasy (c 1934-36) shows the seaport of Gloucester Harbour, with graffiti made by Hartley using a pencil in the oil paint.

Both Brumback and Hartley visited a historic area in the hills between Gloucester and Rockport. Between 1693 and 1830, this had been a flourishing settlement known as Dogtown. In the middle of the eighteenth century this housed up to a hundred families. The growth of Gloucester drew people away, and in the early nineteenth century Dogtown had been largely depopulated, leaving a few occupants, some of whom were accused of witchcraft. The last building was demolished in 1845, and the land returned to dense forest.

Louise Upton Brumback’s Dogtown, Cape Ann, Massachusetts (1920) shows this area. Rocky and with poor soil, it now consists of woodland with a mesh of trails and old roads, as seen in the valley on the right.

When Marsden Hartley returned to the USA in 1930, he toured some of the classic locations in Massachusetts, including Dogtown. On an early visit there in 1931, he painted his Blueberry Highway, Dogtown, an unusual take on this desolate wooded and rocky area, which must have been in the fall/autumn. He wrote that Dogtown was a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge.

Dogtown Common (1936) is Hartley’s later and more conventional depiction of this abandoned settlement.