A Circa View A circa 1930 view of Frank Allen's Boothbay Studios on the east side of the Harbor. It was in the general area of Dougie Carter's Sea Pier. (Photo Carol And Alan Fisher)

"Drawn to Boothbay, Part II" is a continuation of last week's profile of Boothbay Harbor's art schools of the early 1900s. Last week, Asa Randall's Commonwealth Art Colony was covered; this week the Allen and Cross schools are profiled.

The historical society is grateful to Carol and Alan Fisher, of Sprucewold and East Lansing, Michigan, for researching the schools, writing the articles, and organizing and mounting a summer-long exhibit about the art schools at the society building. We thank them for their hard work and the goodwill and interest they've created for the benefit of the society.

Barbara Rumsey

A second art school/colony was founded in 1921 by Frank Leonard Allen and Henry Bayley Snell. Called Boothbay Studios, and described in its brochures as a Summer School of Industrial, Normal, and Fine Art, the school occupied by 1924 six buildings along the shore on Boothbay Harbor's east side just south of the Catholic Church. Boothbay Studios had a central dining room, the Tar Pot, and three houses that were used as dormitories. Frank Allen had studied at the Boston Museum School of Art with Frank Benson and Edmond Tarbell, studied and taught in Peking, China, taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Yonkers School of Design, and had been an instructor at the Commonwealth under Asa Randall. In 1931 Allen would move from Pratt to become Director of Art Education at the Cranbrook Foundation in Michigan. Snell was a well-known American impressionist painter from New Hope, Pennsylvania.

At its height, Boothbay Studios had an average of 160 students and ten faculty who taught not only studio art but methods classes for industrial arts, middle and high school teachers, and curriculum building. It may have been the largest private art school in the U.S. Among the teachers at Boothbay Studios in 1925 were Frank Allen's wife, Ruth Eriksson Allen who had studied at Pratt as well as the Boston Institute of Fine Arts, and worked as a modeler for Grueby Pottery in Boston; Royal Bailey Farnum, the Director of Art Education for the State of Massachusetts; Mary C. Scovel, Head of Teacher Training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Elizabeth Getz, Supervisor of Drawing for New York City Schools and a former student at the Julian Academy in Paris. Boothbay Studios continued to thrive until the year of its closing, 1942.

Anson Kent Cross founded the third of Boothbay Harbor's art schools/colonies, the Anson K. Cross Vision-Training Art School, in 1931. Cross had taught at the Massachusetts State Normal Art School and the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and at the Commonwealth from 1926 to its closing in 1930. As was the case with the other two schools/colonies on Boothbay Harbor's east side, Cross's school was located at 2 Bay Street, in the former Autostop Inn. Tom Cavanaugh's Bay Street Studio is now located there (and Tom Cavanaugh has provided invaluable information to us for this article and the exhibit.)

Asa Randall worked at Cross's school in 1932 and Florence Randall continued with Cross until his school closed in 1944. Others who were associated with the Cross school were Lillian Hale who had also taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and who exhibited at the Solon d'Automne in Paris and the New York City Watercolor Society; John Nichols Haapanen, a teacher at the Cross school, is known in the region for his own longstanding gallery by the harbor's footbridge, and for his many paintings of the land and seascapes of Boothbay Harbor; and Carola Spaeth Hauschka, from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and known for her portraits, including one of her neighbor in Princeton, New Jersey, Albert Einstein.

Today the traditions of these art schools and colonies are maintained in the Boothbay region by the many artists who live or summer here. Tom Cavanaugh and his Bay Street Studio continues to contribute to the artistic and cultural life of Boothbay Harbor and is a font of knowledge about the earlier occupant of 2 Bay Street, Anson K. Cross. And the tradition of the Commonwealth Art colony is still alive on Mt. Pisgah in Kim and Philippe Villard's studio on the grounds of the former colony at 57 Campbell Street. Some of the art school buildings, as well as cottages formerly owned or rented by art colony residents (and remnants of The Cloister) are privately owned, many by residents who keep alive the Commonwealth's history.

Through July and August, an exhibit commemorating these Boothbay art colonies/schools is presented at the Boothbay Region Historical Society, 72 Oak Street. Its hours are Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and all are welcome.