Around the World in 90 Years

Abbott Fuller Graves found success by merging his interest in flowers and architecture, creating a wonderful legacy of floral still lifes and charming New England garden scenes that were shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the early twentieth century. Vose Galleries hosted several one-person shows of his work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, as well as a memorial exhibition in 1937, one year after his passing.

Cape Porpoise Cottage was featured in Graves’ 1932 solo exhibition at the gallery, and demonstrates his successful merger of his dual passion for old New England homes and the thriving landscapes surrounding them. The charming bungalow-style retreat, with its fish-shaped weathervane alluding to its coastal locale, sits nestled among a mature garden of both planted flowers and naturally growing seaside grasses meandering among age-old boulders.

After the Vose Galleries show, the painting was part of several traveling exhibitions organized and brought by Robert C. Vose to venues across the country. These touring presentations, begun in the mid-1910s and lasting through the late 1940s, featured both European and American artists, deceased and contemporary, and were part of Mr. Vose’s strategy to expand the gallery’s reputation for quality fine art beyond New England collectors. Cape Porpoise Cottage was among the dozens of works he brought to the Biltmore Salon in Los Angeles in both 1933 and 1934, while later in the decade it was among the offerings shown at the Hotel Statler in Detroit, Michigan, in December 1936; the Society of Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida, in January 1937; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in Texas in February; and the Dallas Museum of Art in March. News clippings in these cities reported high attendance and an appreciation for the excellent paintings and informative lectures, yet very few sales resulted, undoubtedly a reflection of the ongoing effects of the Depression.

While Cape Porpoise Cottage journeyed thousands of miles during the 1930s, it ultimately sold to a collector in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1952 and descended in one family for two generations. It has now made its way back to Vose Galleries again, and from another great distance, as the grandson of the purchaser resided in Australia!

The painting is in excellent shape, having recently been conserved, and is housed in the same frame it was presented in nearly a century ago, which has been painstakingly repaired and restored by Jared Tuveson of Tuveson Studios in North Berwick, Maine.