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.

In the first of these two articles visiting the coast of Maine, I showed the work of nineteenth century artists, ending with Winslow Homer’s works made in and around his studio at Prouts Neck, just twenty-five metres/yards from the North Atlantic Ocean. To remind you of the locations named for these paintings, here’s Maine’s entry in the National Atlas of the United States (1997).

Many of the paintings in this article, covering the twentieth century, were made by one of America’s most prominent Impressionists, Childe Hassam (1859–1935). Born in Boston, his mother was a Mainer. Hassam returned to New York after completing his training in Paris, in 1889, and started to spend his summers in the country, often in his mother’s home state, and typically on Appledore Island, the largest of the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of Portsmouth and straddling the border between New Hampshire and Maine. Over the next twenty-five years or so, Hassam painted some of the finest views of this section of the coast, which also reflect his artistic development.

Thomas Laighton and Levi Thaxter were responsible for starting the tourist trade on Appledore Island in the middle of the nineteenth century. When she was only fifteen, Laighton’s daughter Celia married Thaxter, and later she became a popular poet, one of the leading figures on the island. Hassam’s Celia Thaxter’s Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine (1890) shows the poet’s flower garden in his high Impressionist style, and tells how idyllic those summers must have been.

The following summer, Hassam moved his easel closer to the water’s edge for his Poppies, Isles of Shoals (1891), shifting his emphasis more to the coast itself.

Hassam then spent summers in other locations suited to his Impressionist leaning: Gloucester, MA, and sections of the Connecticut coast.

He seems to have returned to Appledore Island soon into the new century, when he found life in New York getting him down. His style had evolved and his brushwork and use of fine marks of contrasting colours are more typical of late Pissarro, and become Post-Impressionist in passages. This is shown well in his choice of motif and facture in Cliff Rock – Appledore from 1903.

The following summer, he dispensed with all land apart from a sliver of distant shore, painting just the sea and its white horses in The West Wind, Isles of Shoals (1904).

After a bout of depression and heavy drinking, Hassam reformed himself, taking his art outdoors again. He painted extensively in Oregon, including its rugged coast, visited Paris again, and worked with renewed enthusiasm and energy.

This took him back to Appledore Island, although his friend Celia Thaxter had died almost twenty years earlier. Isles of Shoals, Broad Cove (1911) once again shows his use of broken, contrastingly coloured brushstrokes, and his stark motif.

Part of his rejuvenation was to use a broader range of media, including pastels and watercolours. His Sunday Morning, Appledore (1912) is one of his briskly painted watercolour sketches.

This watercolour sketch of The Gorge, Appledore (1912) shows how differently he depicts the coastal rocks with bolder strokes of transparent colour.

When he returned to oils, though, he reframes completely with increasingly organised groups of brushstrokes, as in The North Gorge, Appledore, Isles of Shoals (1912).

The following summer he was back on Appledore Island, painting outdoors. In The South Ledges, Appledore (1913), his placement of a figure in a white dress and hat against near-white rock merges her with her surroundings. A more conventional approach would have set her against the darker rock in the distance, or dressed her in contrasting clothing.

Just as he had in The West Wind, Isles of Shoals from almost a decade earlier, Hassam pushed the land to each side, and in his Surf, Isles of Shoals (1913) concentrated his canvas almost entirely on the sea.

As an Impressionist, it was natural that he was repeatedly drawn to paint the coast of Maine. A more surprising visitor was Robert Henri (1865–1929), leader of the Ashcan school of realism in New York. Having made his reputation with gritty paintings of the urban landscape in New York City, he had the pochade gear and the technique.

Perhaps Henri too needed a break from city life, and in 1911 headed up to paint outdoors in front of the waves rolling in from the Atlantic. Marine – Break over Sunken Rock, Storm Sea (1911) is an example of what he painted in his pochade box. Two years later, Henri crossed the ocean to paint on Achill Island, on the north-western edge of Ireland.

George Bellows (1882–1925) is probably the best-known of Henri’s students. They had both been born in Ohio, and met in New York in 1904. Bellows made similarly rough-hewn cityscapes of New York City, concentrating on its human landscape, and painted a remarkable series depicting boxing contests.

When Robert Henri went to Maine for the summer, George Bellows went to paint on Monhegan, a small and barely populated island about fifteen miles offshore, south-west of Rockland. That first summer, one of his pochade panels was The Gulls, Monhegan (1911), its greyness broken only by the brilliant white of the birds. Bellows also visited Matinicus Isle, five miles further out into the Atlantic.

A couple of years later, Bellows painted this Rock Reef, Maine (1913).

His panels then became more colourful, capturing the unusual hues of the water and rock, in his Monhegan Island, Maine (1913).

Then, when the sun came out and the weather was set fair, Bellows’ coast burst into brilliant colour, in The Grove – Monhegan, from the same summer.

From Thomas Cole and his student Frederic Edwin Church, to Robert Henri and his student George Bellows, paintings of the coast of Maine represent much of the history of American landscape art, at least that of the East Coast. It’s a coast of great contrasts, of magnificent natural beauty, and the raw power of the ocean and weather.