Nantucket Art Colony
In the early twentieth century Nantucket was home to a generation of artists – The Nantucket art colony established by Florence Lang, a Nantucket summer resident and native of Montclair, New Jersey.
In 1924, converting an old cooper’s shop into the island’s first modern art gallery- the Easy Street Gallery, exhibiting group of artists, known as the “waterfront artists” with Frank Swift Chase, the painter and teacher who arrived in 1920 and would become the “dean of Nantucket artists.”
Shows at the Easy Street Gallery ran typically for the month of August, with exhibition rosters that included Frank Swift Chase and his remarkable corps of students, among them, Anne Ramsdell Congdon, Ruth Haviland Sutton, Emily Hoffmeier, Elizabeth Saltonstall, Isabelle Tuttle, Gertrude Monaghan, and Harriet Lord. Other significant talents such as Tony Sarg, Walter Gilman Page, Inna Garsoian, Henry S. Eddy, and Edgar Jenney, and prominent visiting artists like Richard Hayley Lever showed frequently. Hundreds of artists exhibited their work at the gallery during its twenty-year existence.
