Andrew Winter was one of the many
artists attracted to Monhegan Island in the first half of the
twentieth century, and his best paintings were chilly scenes of
the island in winter, when the gray-green sea was at its wildest
and the stark little island village was hunkered down against
the wind and cold. Andrew Winter set sail as an able-bodied seaman
from the port of Riga, in nearby Latvia, in 1913 and rarely looked
back. He sailed the world aboard square -riggers and steamships,
the indelible record of his travels tattooed on his arms in the
form of anchors and mermaids, geisha girls and bathing beauties,
sea horses and dragons, tropical birds and flowers.
In 1940 Winter and purchased a cottage near the lighthouse not
far from where the trails to Whitehead and Cathedral Woods diverge.
Working in a little studio built on a bluff overlooking the village,
Winter proceeded to spend the next seventeen years painting every
square inch of Monhegan, from Lobster Cove to Fish Beach, Black
Head to Gull Rock. Among his best and most sought-after paintings
were those of the inhospitable seas and the village in winter.
During his lifetime, Winter earned a modest living from the sale
of his work and a slew of prizes from conservative arts organizations
such as the National Academy of Design, Salmagundi Club, and Allied
Artists of America. He also won federal commissions to make paintings
for the U.S. Coast Guard and to paint a mural of sugar mapling
for the Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, post office. A letter in the
files at the Famswonh An Museum in Rockland written in 2000 by
an Andrew Winter collector suggests that Winter should be considered
"in the ranks of Kent and Bellows but somehow escaped this
recognition and for the most part is unknown and unappreciated.
"He painted Monhegan in all seasons," notes in Maine
In America: American Art at the Farnsworth An Museum (University
of New England Press, 2000), "frequently rowing around the
island in the worst of weather to capture scenes of the harshest
seas and most dramatic views of the cliffs and rocks
The Farnsworth put Winter on what it calls its "A List"
in the book along with Bellows and Kent.
As recently as the late 1980s, Winter canvases were selling, if
they sold al all, for several hundred to just over a thousand
dollars, but in the late 1990s prices paid for good Winter paintings
of Monhegan started to climb into the tens of thousands of dollars
.
