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Ferguson spent several summers working with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown before eventually purchasing her own home and thereafter dividing her time between Massachusetts and Philadelphia. She was enchanted by the tiny fishing community at the tip of Cape Cod and found much to inspire her among its winding roads, charming clapboard houses and throngs of summertime visitors: “I liked to paint the streets, crowded with people, happy when carts, automobiles and people did not block my view, and strangers asked no questions. But the solitude and quietness of the dunes from where one could look down at the town and bay below, afforded an opportunity for undisturbed painting of real beauty.”

Ferguson’s plein air depictions of Provincetown were admired for their freshness of color and intuitive use of space, particular in the arrangement of houses and other structures within the composition in a somewhat cubist fashion. This quality caused her to be remembered as “a modernist long before the modern movement had taken its hold on American painting.” As the artists’ colony continued to grow, the Provincetown Art Association was founded in 1914 and Ferguson participated in numerous annual exhibitions beginning with the following year’s inaugural show. She also served on exhibition juries and hanging committees in the teens and twenties, and for the next several decades remained an integral member of Provincetown art circles.

Provenance:

Private collection, Michigan
To private collection, Duxbury, Massachusetts, 2019

Inscription:

(verso of board) Nancy Maybin Ferguson

Labels:

Previous Vose Galleries label, inventory no. 37117