Jane Peterson (1876–1965)

JANE PETERSON (1876–1965)
Fishermen's Huts, Gloucester
Gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper, 18 x 24 in.
Signed (at lower right): JANE PETERSON

EX COLL.: Abraham and Sylvia Burack, Boston, and by descent, until the present

Jane Peterson went to Gloucester in 1914, following a well-trod path. The atmospheric fishing village on Cape Ann in the northeast corner of Massachusetts had attracted artists ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when it was made famous by its native son and lifelong resident, the artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865). As one resident artist, Frederick J. Mulhaupt (1871–1938) noted, Gloucester “duplicates any view I care to paint”. Indeed, with its steep and narrow streets winding down to a busy harbor, its heroic fisher folk, and its nearby dramatic landscape and seascape features, Gloucester’s variety of subjects offered inspiration for generations of artists including Winslow Homer, William Morris Hunt, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Edward Potthast, John Twachtman, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis.

Jane Peterson visited Gloucester for a series of summers during the years of World War I. At a time when her accustomed fishing ports of Holland, Belgium, England, and Brittany were inaccessible, Gloucester offered a patriotic equivalent, made all the more attractive by an easy rail trip from New York and Boston. Although there is, at present, no precise chronology of Peterson’s travels, she exhibited Gloucester views as early as 1915 and regularly thereafter.