“We found Cragsmoor by accident,” says photographer Lori Grinker. “We fell in love with the atmosphere and bought a very sad house with good karma and are fixing it up.” A real estate broker told her, she adds, that “we would fit in well with the community. I had no idea what she meant until we moved in and began meeting everyone. It’s a warm and welcoming community who work together on all sorts of things. It’s almost like a large family.”
Painter Elinore Hollinshead’s family has been in Cragsmoor for six generations – something that she didn’t even know the extent of until adulthood. She lives there because she derives inspiration from nature, she says, “and Cragsmoor has been in my life’s blood since earliest childhood experiences and memories: the changing varieties of light and season that signify the passing of time.”
Ann Butter is one of the artists living in Cragsmoor today whose home was built by one of the original Cragsmoor artists. Looking for a weekend home in Ulster County in the 1980s, she says, “We answered an ad mentioning the scenic views of Cragsmoor. We were shown the 1884 E. L. Henry house, one of Cragsmoor’s founding artists. We were immediately smitten by the interesting details of the house, the huge studio and the amazing view of the mountain. The house was shown to us by a local historian who had all sorts of documents about the house. We bought it two days later.”
Butter’s house was designed and built by Edward Lamson Henry (1841-1919), a well-known genre painter of the time who depicted scenes of everyday people going about their lives. Henry was also known for a series of Civil War scenes that he sketched during battles in Virginia. He studied with Gustave Courbet in Paris in the 1860s before opening his own studio in New York City, and began spending summers at Cragsmoor in 1872, settling there permanently in 1884.
Sculptor Richard Arnold’s family knew the Cragsmoor area well through visiting the Minnewaska and Mohonk hotels for three generations, he says. Although he eventually left the area, settling in Sullivan County, he has retained his ties with the community and continues to exhibit with them. For most of the 1980s Arnold made his home in Cragsmoor in the 1907 Charles Curran house, Winahdin, which was designed for Curran by fellow Cragsmoor artist Frederick Dellenbaugh (the aforementioned instigator of changing the name of Evansville to Cragsmoor in 1893).
Dellenbaugh (1853-1935) designed a number of the homes in Cragsmoor as well as the Cragsmoor Free Library and the community’s only church, known simply as “the Stone Church.” An adventurous sort, he participated in John Wesley Powell’s second expedition on the Colorado River in the early 1870s, producing sketches during the trip that became the basis of the first oil paintings to depict the Grand Canyon. He also painted works based on exploratory expeditions that he took to Alaska, Norway, Iceland, Siberia, the West Indies and South America, as well as the American Southwest.
The owner of the house, American Impressionist Charles Courtney Curran (1861-1942), studied in Paris in the late 1880s before moving to New York City part-time, spending summer months working in the studio at his home in Cragsmoor. An historian described Curran’s work as combining “sweeping vistas of the Cragsmoor area with the almost-whimsical delicacy of the female form.”
There doesn’t appear to be any crossover between the artists of the Hudson River School and the original Cragsmoor artists, who were more Impressionist in style or genre painters, like John George Brown (1831-1913), who found commercial success depicting children in rural settings in his early work and urban kids polishing shoes or hawking newspapers in his later work. Born in England, he became an American citizen at age 32 and spent many summers working in Cragsmoor. He exhibited annually at the National Academy of Design in New York City for five decades and compared his work to “what a good newspaper reporter would have done” in showing people of the future how the children of his era looked.
William Holbrook Beard (1824-1900) was a leading animal painter of the time who eventually opened a studio in Buffalo and spent summers at Cragsmoor. Edward B. Gay (1837-1928), originally from Ireland, had immigrated to Albany when he was 11. He produced large landscapes and built a home in Cragsmoor in 1905, where he painted during the summer for the remainder of his life.
Helen M. Turner (1858-1959) studied in New York City with Kenyon Cox, attaining a full membership in the National Academy of Design in 1921. She divided her time for years between the city and Cragsmoor, where many of her paintings depicted local models on the porch of her studio against a background of colorful flowers.
Cragsmoor Free Library director and artist Hattie Grifo will discuss the artistic heritage of Cragsmoor in a free lecture and PowerPoint presentation at the Wired Gallery on Saturday, May 9 at 4:30 p.m. Grifo co-edited a book in 2012 about Cragsmoor history, a collection of essays by herself and other Cragsmoor residents titled Cragsmoor: Historical Portraits.
Wired Gallery is open Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. or by appointment.
“Cragsmoor Artists Today” gallery talk with Hattie Grifo, Saturday, May 9, 4:30 p.m., through Sunday, May 24, Wired Gallery, 11 Mohonk Road, High Falls; (682) 564-5613, www.thewiredgallery.com.
