Mountfort Coolidge (American 1888-1954) expressive oil on canvas board painting landscape, oil on canvas board landscape, Summer Hills, Maine. A stunning piece full of movement and depth. Old tag attached from the Liros Gallery in Blue Hills, Maine with price of $2600. Artwork in frame measures 25" x 29". Artwork and frame are both in very good condition. Very minor markings at top edge from old framing.
Coolidge was a pupil of Social Realist painter Robert Henri in New York. In the early teens, Coolidge traveled with his family to Ogunquit (Maine), already a thriving arts community, and became a student of Hamilton Easter Field. He continued to summer in Ogunquit for over 40 years, where he was associated with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Niles Spencer, Marsden Hartley, Bernard Karfiol, and his partner, society painter Channing Hare, with whom he operated a small antiques business. Hare and Coolidge shared a home on Pine Hill North.
Coolidge was influenced by the French Impressionists and the Fauves. His expressive landscapes include simplified forms and patterns of color reflecting the artist’s experience of the local environment. Coolidge's paintings are more than just representative paintings chronicling the landscape around him, they are expressions of the landscape as he experienced it as a "series of geometric and organic shapes and forms, patterns of color, and of images of the time in which he lived."
