“How Jane Peterson rose from humble origins to become an internationally acclaimed artist, world traveler, and wealthy patron of the arts is a quintessentially American story,” wrote Peterson expert J. Jonathan Joseph. [1] Peterson’s biography reflects the hallmarks of American ambition, as does her body of work. Her paintings exemplify a distinctly American Impressionist sensibility, one that captured the rhythms of modern life and leisure, while synthesizing the artistic languages she encountered abroad. Influenced by Impressionism, Fauvism, Art Nouveau, and Expressionism, Peterson filtered each through a resolutely individual lens.

Gloucester Harbor–Late Afternoon exemplifies Peterson’s most celebrated subject and stands among the most exceptional examples of her distinctive mode of expression. Large in scale and thickly painted, the canvas depicts the bustling Massachusetts harbor bathed in radiant afternoon light. Its surface shimmers with mosaic-like brush strokes, recalling the lively crowd scenes of fellow American artist Maurice Prendergast. Like Prendergast, and preceding generations of American artists, Peterson was drawn to Gloucester’s unique blend of atmospheric light, maritime industry, and quaint charm. [2]

Born Jennie Peterson in Elgin, Illinois, in 1895, she moved to New York to study first at the Pratt Institute and later at the Art Students League. There, her talent caught the attention of influential patrons such as Alexander M. Hudnut, who became a lifelong friend and enabled her extensive travel abroad beginning in 1907. Peterson studied in London with Frank Brangwyn, whose art-nouveau–inflected line and bold compositions she admired, and in Madrid with Joaquín Sorolla, absorbing his high-key impressionistic palette and spontaneous brushwork—lessons fully evident in Gloucester Harbor–Late Afternoon. When she returned to the United States, she did so with a renewed sense of artistic identity, signaled perhaps by her symbolic name change from Jennie to Jane. Success followed quickly. Her solo exhibitions in Boston and New York were warmly received, and her work proved broadly popular with collectors. Ever patriotic, during the First World War Peterson joined peers such as Childe Hassam in depicting the home-front war effort, contributing paintings that reinforced national unity and civic pride.

In 1925, Peterson married M. Bernard Philipp, a wealthy arts patron. The marriage required her to adopt her husband’s daily routine, relinquishing the extensive travel that fueled her painterly output. Establishing a studio in the couple’s Madison Avenue mansion, Peterson redirected her attention to floral compositions, which would dominate her later career. Throughout her career, a unifying principle endured—one she absorbed from her instructor Arthur Wesley Dow at Pratt. “My great and absorbing passion is the love of beauty,” Peterson explained. “As fine art is the application of the principle of aesthetics or beauty, painting has especially appealed to me as an outlet.” [3]

In 1968, three years after her death, critic Hilton Kramer reflected on her legacy for a New York Times review of a Robert Schoelkopf Gallery exhibition:

This American painter… was an accomplished fellow traveler of the elegant, genteel modern styles that derived from impressionism and postimpressionism and became the favored pictorial idiom in this country during the first three decades of this century. Landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes of Europe and America provided the felicitous motifs, and Miss Peterson often rose to the occasion with some deft, brillant [sic] brushwork and a neat painterly intelligence. [4]

Indeed, Peterson’s achievements endure in paintings such as Gloucester Harbor–Late Afternoon, where the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist currents she absorbed in Europe merged with her distinctly American vision.

[1] J. Jonathan Joseph, Jane Peterson: An American Artist, Boston, 1981, p. 21

[2] Peterson followed in a lineage that stretches from the nineteenth-century Luminist Fitz Henry Lane to American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, and John Twachtman, each of whom found in Gloucester an ideal place for exploring modern color and light.

[3] Jane Peterson, Why I Paint Flowers, Garden Magazine, September 1922, reproduced in J. Jonathan Joseph, Jane Peterson: An American Artist, Boston, 1981, p. 106; Regarding Arthur Wesley Dow, Georgia O’Keeffe, a fellow student of Dow’s from Columbia University Teachers College, recalled that he “had one dominating idea: to fill a space in a beautiful way.”

[4] Hilton Kramer, “Jane Peterson,” New York Times, April 6, 1968, p. 35