By Hannah Gadway
Featured image courtesy of Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images
From our September 2024 issue
Portrait painter John Singer Sargent’s circa 1921 watercolor The Piazza; On the Verandah depicts an upper-crust family whiling away a summer day on a columned porch. Three women in billowy white clothes bend over knitting and needlework, while a man in a jacket and tie reclines in an armchair, smoking a pipe and gazing out at the verdant landscape. In the lower left-hand corner, a tiny inscription, “To my friend Dwight Blaney,” signed by the artist, identifies the idler, whose home on Ironbound Island, in Winter Harbor, Sargent was visiting. Though an accomplished painter in his own right, and a pioneer of American impressionism, Blaney is nevertheless mostly remembered the way Sargent portrayed him: as a subject and consummate host, whose Ironbound retreat inspired some of the biggest names in the late-19th- and early-20th-century art world.
Blaney’s guests included impressionist Childe Hassam, who captured an Ironbound sunset in broken brushstrokes and a jewel-like palette and Blaney’s wife, Edith (whom their daughter, Eliza- beth, said Sargent made look “somehow . . . like the piano tuner!”), with a book and a placid expression. Impressionist John Leslie Breck, a friend of Monet’s, rendered the island’s cliffs in brilliant ruddy tones. Portrait painter William McGregor Paxton depicted a young Elizabeth seated before a fireplace decorated with seashells and gleaming brass pots in Blaney’s studio. And, in The Artist Sketching, Sargent portrayed Blaney alone with his paintbrush and easel atop a sun-dappled rock, looking into the distance and seemingly lost in thought.
“Blaney is more famous for that painting, and maybe The Piazza; On the Verandah, than anything else,” says Brent Funderburk, professor emeritus of art at Mississippi State University, who, in 2002, co-curated the only solo exhibition of Blaney’s work (aptly titled Dwight Blaney — An American Impressionist . . . And Friends). Over the course of 50 years, Blaney produced numerous plein-air oil and watercolor impressionist landscapes — painted on an 1890s European tour, in Massachusetts, where he lived most of the year, on trips to Bermuda, and on Ironbound — “that are just as technically accomplished as his colleagues’ work,” Funderburk says. His Bermuda paintings “look like Winslow Homer’s watercolors from the Caribbean. And when he painted with Hassam, using long, fast brushstrokes — what Blaney was able to accomplish is as good as Hassam.” Despite such evident skill, Funderburk says, “he was hard to categorize.”
Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1865, Blaney worked as a tombstone designer and as a draftsman at an architectural firm before marrying heiress Edith Hill, in 1893. No longer needing to earn a living, he collected American antiques and Native American artifacts he excavated from shell middens, later bequeathing the latter to Bar Harbor’s Abbe Museum. After purchasing Ironbound Island (which remains privately owned by the Blaney family) and building a summer cottage there, he studied the area’s mollusks, eventually identifying 149 varieties, including two new ones that are named after him. In 1916, he and paleontologist Frederic Brewster Loomis extracted 23 varieties of mollusks from Pleistocene clays on Mount Desert Island. Blaney also painted prolifically, while nurturing the careers of his peers by sharing his retreat and sometimes providing them with financial support. But because Blaney wasn’t solely focused on art, Funderburk says, “and because there were so many incredible early American modernists who sort of eclipsed American impressionism for so long — Whistler, Chase, O’Keeffe, Hartley, the Wyeths — there wasn’t room in art history for Blaney.”
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From left: Cove on Ironbound Island, Dwight Blaney, 1919, oil on canvas; A Cape Cod Road, Dwight Blaney, 1921, watercolor
Blaney’s great-granddaughter, Portland painter Judy Greene-Janse, thinks his preoccupation with the Maine landscape — in works such as those depicting cliffs rendered in the muted blue, gold, and rose tones of Monet’s Haystacks, a feathery spruce forest with an almost pointillistic sand beach in the foreground, and an Ironbound cove with a gray-shingled shack and a figure in a flowy white dress reminiscent of Monet’s Woman with a Parasol — set him apart from many of his more renowned peers. Still, “when you’re closely associated with more famous people, it’s harder to shine yourself,” Greene-Janse says.
Funderburk suspects Blaney didn’t much mind ceding the spotlight. “I don’t know that he was that interested in finding some iconic voice. He was happy to share and have a back-and-forth with other artists. When you look in books at so-called art colonies, you won’t necessarily find what he was doing on Ironbound, and yet, incredible things happened there. So if you asked me, what was the mission of Blaney? In many ways, it was to have a vibrant life in art and nature with friends. And that satisfied him more than fame or glory as an artist.”
