Gertrude Fiske’s House, Pine Hill Road, Ogunquit, Maine is an excellent example of her outdoor work, demonstrating her strong sense of design and confident brushwork. The intersection of strong vertical and diagonal elements leads the viewer’s eyes into the painting while the summertime color palette, applied with bold sweeps of her brush, enliven a view she would have seen daily.

More information about this painting...

Gertrude Fiske was born in Boston, the eldest of six children, to an old, well-established New England family. She entered the Boston Museum School around 1904 and studied under Edmund C. Tarbell, Frank Benson, and Philip Hale. During the summers, she attended classes in Ogunquit, Maine, under the tutelage of the art colony’s founder Charles H. Woodbury, whose bold, painterly approach to landscape painting influenced her own artistic style.

By her late thirties, Fiske had earned her reputation as a leading woman painter in Boston. Her increasing interest in the art and artists of New England led her to become a founding member of the Guild of Boston Artists, a co-founder along with friend and artist Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts of the Concord Art Association, as well as a participant in the creation of the Ogunquit Art Association. Fiske exhibited annually with various art associations, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and in 1930 she was named the first and only woman to the Massachusetts State Art Commission.

Today Fiske’s work can be found in the collections of several museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey, and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. In 2017 the retrospective Gertrude Fiske: American Master was arranged by the Portsmouth Historical Society in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, her first major solo exhibition since Vose Galleries’ show in 1987.

Provenance:

Estate of the artist (the artist's family)

With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. GF-240, circa 1980s

Returned to the artist's estate (artist's family), April 1988

Eventually with Tom Veilleux Gallery, Portland, Maine

To private collection, Ypsilanti, Michigan, March 2019 to present

Inscription:

(verso of board in pencil, presumably written later and possibly by the estate) G. Fiske's House / Pine Hill Road / Ogunquit

Labels:

1. Weber Artist Canvas Board / F. Weber Co. Phila. U.S.A. / (handwritten) Andrew Willis / (stamp) Estate of Gertrude Fiske / 187[9]-1961
2. Tom Veilleux Gallery / Gertrude Fiske / (1879-1961) / Fiske House, Ogunquit / 12" x 16" oil on board