AFA 22nd Anniversary

2022 Antiques & Fine Art 93 New York Artist’s League; the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris; the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (the famed Munich Academy); and other f ine learning institutions. Prestigiously schooled, they brought their easels and palettes out to paint Long Island’s low horizons and rich saturated coastal colors. While other artists made their way to the Hudson River Valley, the great American West, and other destinations, these individuals found inspiration eastward, close to home. Their choice was as much about the diverse views and the picturesque, unique clean skies and air of Long Island’s East End, as improved transportation infrastructure. Scores of writers and publications described Long Island’s East End as rapturously as the new artists painted it. Native son Walt Whitman described it in his newspaper dispatches for various city dailies and gloried at, in his region-boosting poem Paumanok , the “isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water—healthy air and soil.” William Cullen Bryant, in Picturesque America (1874), wrote in a vivid pictorial style which echoes many famous paintings, that “the interest of the scene continually varies” on the East End . Painters had unimpeded access and, at least in the early years, reasonable prices that made extended plein air sojourns possible. The arrival of schools, like William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock School, further encouraged artistic exploration across the region. Chase opened the first plein-air Shinnecock Summer School of Art, located just west of Southampton. The school lasted eleven years until 1902. A number of its students went on to become well-known and their work well-documented. Another encouraging factor for artists arriving on Long Island in the early twentieth century was the lure of wealthy residents and possible patronage. Between the end of the Civil War and the early days of the Great Depression, more than 1,000 large country houses were built across the area for many of New York’s wealthiest families. One such was the glassmaker and artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose development of the Tiffany Foundation in 1918, at his 580- Irving Ramsey Wiles (1861–1948), The Peconic Art Colony, ca. 1912. Oil on canvas, 20½ x 27½ inches. The Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages, Stony Brook, NY; Gift of D. Frederick Baker of the Baker/Pisano Collection.