COLLECTION SEARCH RESULTS

Highlights from The William J. Glackens Collection in the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale by Elizabeth Thompson Colleary:

Cape Cod Pier was painted in 1908, when Glackens spent the summer in the town of Dennis on Cape Cod with his family. It represents a major turning point in Glackens’s style, as he turned away from his usual palette of dark, earth-tones and adopted the sun-drenched colorism of French art, as in the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the French Fauves (Henri Matisse and Andre Derain), and American artists, such as Maurice Prendergast. The painting has long been admired but its specific site has been identified only recently. Photographs housed at the Dennis Historical Society confirm that Glackens depicted a pier that extended into Cape Cod Bay from a beach on the grounds of the famous Nobscussett Hotel.

The preparatory sketches Glackens drew as he worked out the final composition for Cape Cod Pier reveal the artist’s creative process.The drawings all were done from a vantage point looking back at the beach and dunes from the end of the pier, but in one, which clearly shows the Nobscusett Hotel bathhouse on the bluffs overlooking the water, no figures are present, and in another, a man leans on the pier railing on the right. The final composition opens out toward us as we view the the expansive pier from the vantage point of two women strolling in front of us – we vicariously walk behind them, taking in the view that they and the artist enjoyed.