Monhegan Island, Maine

Pastel on paperboard
11 7/8 x 16 inches

Signed and dated lower left: WALTER GRIFFIN ’08

1908
$6,500

Walter Griffin became active in the Old Lyme artists’ colony around 1905, forming lasting friendships and exhibiting with fellow painters Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Ernest Lawson and John Henry Twachtman. He began taking part in annual shows at the Pennsylvania Academy and the National Academy, which elected Griffin an Associate in 1912, before traveling abroad again in 1908. Prior to departing for Europe, however, Griffin spent a short time on Monhegan Island, Maine, where this pastel of fifish shacks along a rocky shoreline was drawn. Although he worked there only briefly, the island’s isolation and rugged beauty offered him a dose of therapy after his divorce from Lillian Baynes Griffin, a photographer and journalist, whom he married in 1899.

Click here to read full artist biography

Estate of Rupert Lovejoy (student and friend of Griffin’s)
To private collection, Boston, Massachusetts
With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. AWV-37, 1994
Returned to private collection, Boston, and now back with Vose Galleries, 2018
  1. (verso of board in graphite) Walter Griffin. 1908 / Monhegan Island. Me
  2. (verso of frame in pencil) Monhegan Island, MAINE, 1908
  1. Light & Color: 150 Years on Paper, Featuring Frank W. Benson & His Contemporaries, Vose Galleries, Boston, April 21 – May 26, 2018

The pastel is done directly on the paperboard (which is a wood pulp board) and has some overall minor toning but no obvious fading.

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