With her foreign travel curtailed during World War I, Jane Peterson explored and painted throughout the country, making regular visits to the Massachusetts artists’ colonies at Martha’s Vineyard, Rockport and Gloucester, as well as Ogunquit, Maine. Reviewers were impressed with the “knock you down fashion”[1] of her Cape Ann dock scenes that she showed in New York and Boston, and in Gloucester at Gallery-on-the Moors and the North Shore Arts Association.

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With its brilliant, summertime palette and dynamic brushwork, Old Street in Gloucester is a quintessential example of Peterson’s work from this time in her career. Peterson also aligned herself with the important women’s associations of the day, joining both the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors and The Group, a circle of six established women artists who exhibited nationally between 1917 and 1919. These organizations offered fellowship and vital exhibition space during a transformative period in American history, as women aided both in the war effort and the struggle for women’s suffrage.

Provenance:

Collection, Litchfield, Connecticut
With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. 27726, July 1984
To private collection, Duxbury, Massachusetts, July 1984 to present

Inscription:

1). (in pencil, top stretcher) #1685
2). (in pencil, top stretcher) Old Street in Gloucester / 18 x 24

Labels:

1). Previous Vose Galleries label, inventory no. 27726
2). Previous Vose Galleries label, inventory no. 29727
3). Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Massachusetts / Lifting the Veil / Women Artists of New England / 1890-1925 / May 6 – June 21, 1987