Opportunities for Artists

For information about current events in the arts across New Hampshire, and opportunities for artists, link to the excellent web site of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts: www.nh.gov/nharts. Their E-news, which is updated every two weeks from the time of posting, is especially useful: www.nh.gov/nharts/newsandcalendar/e-news/e-clips.htm.

The Dublin Art Colony

An important part of our purpose is to celebrate the remarkable and enduring artistic heritage we share in this region.

Although the village of Dublin, New Hampshire, attracted writers and artists since the early 19th century, what eventually became knows as the Dublin Art Colony began to take shape in the late 1880s. Over the next 40 years, an informal group of artists helped transform Dublin from a small rural community with an established summer population into a haven for visual artists, writers, and others drawn to this beautiful setting. Mount Monadnock-one of the places most loved by Thoreau, Emerson, and the other New England Transcendentalists-and the landscape around Dublin, influenced these artists and contributed to their artistic vision.

In 1888, the painter Abbott Handerson Thayer, who grew up nearby, was invited to Dublin where a patron built a house for him, and he and his family became year-round residents. From his years studying in Paris and working in New York and Boston, Thayer already had many friends and associates among the artists of the day, and his presence drew George de Forest Brush to the region. Younger artists who studied or apprenticed with Thayer in Dublin included Richard Meryman, Alexander James, Rockwell Kent and Barry Faulkner. In the early 1890s, painter Joseph Lindon Smith was given land in Dublin to build a home, and Smith's close friend, Frank Weston Benson, came to paint with him. Eventually more than 20 visual artists were associated with Dublin during the first half of the 20th century.

The Dublin artists invited friends from other disciplines as well. Thayer painted a portrait of Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, in 1882, and he told Twain that Dublin was a place congenial for artistic work. Twain spent the summers of 1905 and 1906 in Dublin, and later wrote, "He was right-it was a good place...Any place that is good for an artist in paint is good for an artist in morals and ink..."

Twain continued, "Paint, literature, science, statesmanship, history, professorship, law, morals-these are all represented here, yet crime is substantially unknown..The homes of these refugees are sprinkled a mile apart among the forest-clad hills, with access to each other by firm smooth country rounds which are so embowered in dense foliage that it is always twilight in there and comfortable. The forests are spider-webbed with these good roads, they go everywhere. But for the help of the guideboards, the stranger would not arrive anywhere."

A hundred years later, the area around Mount Monadnock remains a magnet for creativity, and, if you don't have an Art Tour map, you can still get lost on our spider-web of roads!

Although most of these artists worked alone, they met regularly to socialize. They never referred to themselves as an art colony, and would have rejected the idea that they were an organized group. But they created a unique community centered on the arts. We hope to do the same.

For more information about the Dublin Colony, please see the archived articles from our previous Newsletters on the right.

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