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This selection of approximately 40 prints from the permanent collection presents images of Maine made by artist/printmakers at a pivotal time in the history of American Art–a short 50 years that witnessed the flowering of modernism and birth of abstract expressionism. The challenge of expressing modernist styles through this technically demanding medium engaged artists like Rockwell Kent (1882–1971), Carroll Thayer Berry (1886–1978), Leo Meissner (1895–1977), and Pauline Winchester Inman (1904–1990). At the same time more traditionally oriented artists like Frank Weston Benson (1862–1951), Charles Herbert Woodbury (1864–1940), Sears Gallagher (1869–1955), Thomas Nason (1889–1971), Kevin B. O’Callahan (1890–1977) and Stow Wengenroth (1906–1978) continued to build on a realist printmaking tradition that descended from Durer and Rembrandt. The highly individual responses of these artists to the Maine landscape, expressed through the dramatic and reductive medium of the fine art print, contributed to the building of a romantic vision of New England that continues to this day. The selection will include etchings, woodcuts, wood engravings, and lithographs.

Jonathan Fisher: Pioneer Painter and Printmaker

October 15, 2006 - May 15, 2007

Jonathan Fisher was the inventive, creative, resourceful, Harvard-educated pastor of the First Congregational Church in Blue Hill, Maine, appointed to the post in 1796. A gifted, though largely untrained, artist, architect, surveyor, and carpenter, he was also a writer, scientist, and teacher. He fashioned his own engraving tools and taught himself the fundamentals of printmaking. He labored for over 30 years to produce a series of more than 100 small woodblock prints of insects, reptiles, birds and mammals. Many of these were published in 1834 to illustrate his book Scripture Animals, a religious work the purpose of which was primarily educational. This wonderful little volume brought together Fisher’s lifelong fascination with natural history and his deeply felt religious convictions. It is important today because it affords us some understanding of the cultural and philosophical climate in New England at the turn of the 18th century. These diminutive but charming engravings are certainly the earliest works to be included in the Maine Print Project, and indeed are among the earliest known fine art prints from the state. The exhibition will include a selection of the artist’s proofs displayed together with their corresponding wood blocks, and other Fisher ephemera.