Nantucket in August.(Current and coming)

The Nantucket Antiques Show, which takes place at the Nantucket New School on that Massachusetts island from August 3 through August 5 (with a preview opening on the evening of August 2), makes this delightful locale a wonderful destination for art lovers. The show is sponsored by the Nantucket Historical Association and managed by the Antiques Council. From its earliest days in the eighteenth century as a wealthy whaling port, Nantucket has enjoyed a vibrant economy on a scale large enough to support a rich array of artists and craftsmen who created sophisticated examples of fine and decorative arts. Many of these objects have found their way into the collections of the historical association thanks to the generosity of local donors and summer visitors. This summer the association has organized an exhibition entitled The Nantucket Art Colony, 1920-1945, which is on view until November 12 at the Nantucket Whaling Museum. It focuses on the painters and teachers who formed the Nantucket art colony, which was active during those years.

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This colony was primarily populated by women and is said to have been founded by a summer visitor, Florence Lang, an amateur artist who lived in Montclair, New Jersey. In 1920 she and her husband Henry acquired a group of rundown buildings that had formerly been fishermen's shacks and boat-houses on the waterfront and renovated them for use as artists' studios. These she rented out for what were then considered nominal fees of fifty to seventy dollars per season. Most of the renters were women; for example, there were eighteen tenants in 1923, fourteen of whom were women, and of twenty-four who occupied the studios in 1924, twenty-one were women. For the most part they painted independently, but formed close social bonds with their colleagues and neighbors on the waterfront. Also in the early 1920s, Lang opened an art gallery called the Candle House Studio in a transformed candle factory, which was the site of two ...