A sense of place

Presents careful research of a previously unknown New England art colony. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the town of Matunuck, Rhode Island, was home to a number of painters ranging from impressionist Philip Leslie Hale to marine painter William Trost Richards. Based on unpublished letters and paintings, the author discusses the evolution of the summer colony from the arrival in 1873 of the noted writer and reformer Edward Everett Hale to the outbreak of World War II, and defines their work within the context of American art.