A North Shore Master: Paintings and Oil Sketches of Oscar Anderson

06-Apr-2009

Paintings, studies and sketches by the American painter Oscar Anderson (1873-1953) comprise a "pocket show" of fourteen works on view at the gallery. Anderson was one of the leading artists of the Cape Ann art colony that flourished around Gloucester and Rockport, Massachusetts in the early years of the 20th century. Among his colleagues were Harry Aiken Vincent, Anthony Thieme, Max Kuehne, Lester Stevens, and Emil Gruppe, among others.  Born in Sweden, Anderson spent most of his career on Cape Ann, where he was president of the Gloucester Society of Artists. He established annual "Gallery on the Wharf" exhibitions that attracted dozens of visitors to the quaint fishing villages north of Boston. He and his colleagues memorialized the small, historic waterfront towns of Rockport and Gloucester in paintings that have inspired generations of visitors.

With little formal schooling, Anderson developed painting styles that ranged from soft, shimmering tonal works to colorful Impressionistic and realistic styles. The gallery's "pocket show" is a relatively compact exhibit of fourteen newly-acquired works, most of them small – the largest canvases are ten by fourteen inches-- featuring studies, preliminary oil sketches, and plein-air sketches. (Anderson was particularly fond of plein-air (outdoor) painting, and though he had a small cottage studio on East Main Street in Gloucester, he went outside to paint even in the harshest of winters.) The paintings in the show explore the diversity of Anderson's styles and subject matter, from the wintry forest of The Pines to the visual "tone poems" of hazy, fog-shrouded villages to his crisp Impressionistic sketches, composed of thick, energetic brushstrokes in bright bits of color, ingeniously melded to create tiny vignettes of time and place.