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.