The Cornish Art Colony
An Artistic Community Along the Connecticut River
About the Cornish Art Colony
The Cornish Art Colony, active from the 1880s though the early 20th century, was a vibrant community of approximately eighty painters, sculptors, architects, writers, poets, playwrights and other public figures. Drawn by the region’s natural beauty, they came mainly as summer residents although some settled as year-round residents. Despite the name of the colony nearly half of the colonists built or renovated homes in Plainfield. The landscape featured sweeping views of the Connecticut River Valley and Vermont’s Mount Ascutney. Founded around the presence of renowned sculptor Augutus Saint-Gaudens, the colony attracted artists such as etcher and architect Charles Platt, painters Thomas Dewing and Lucia Fairchild Fuller, sculptor Herbert Adams, poet Percy MacKaye, landscape architect Ellen Shipman and musician-composer Arthur Whiting. Other prominent residents included Judge Learned Hand, diplomat George Rublee and even President Woodrow Wilson, who established his Summer White House in Cornish from 1913 to 1915.
Painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish became one of the colony’s most celebrated residents when he established his home and studio, “The Oaks”, just north of the Cornish town line in Plainfield. The stage set he created for the Plainfield Village Town Hall in 1916 stands as a lasting testament to the creative spirit of the Cornish Art Colony and its deep roots in the community.
Please visit www.nps.gov/saga to learn more about Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, a National Park for the Arts.
The Cornish Colony-Windsor Connection
Although the colony was located in Cornish and Plainfield, New Hampshire, colony members frequently crossed the Connecticut River via the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge (the longest vintage covered bridge in America) to conduct banking and business activities in Windsor, Vermont. The train station in Windsor, a nine-hour train ride from New York where many colonists lived in the winter, was also the arrival point for most of the Cornish Colony residents.
Maxfield Parrish did his banking business in Windsor at the Windsor County National Bank. In the 1950s to express his gratitude to the tellers and staff at the bank he gave them a painting: “New Hampshire: Thy Templed Hills”. Bank mergers followed and in 1989 Chittenden Bank (now M & T Bank) decided to sell Parrish’s gift, which had an assessed value of $300,000. Public outcry was intense. Major bank customers let it be known that: “If that painting comes down, my account does too.” In response Chittenden Bank executives called off the sale and admitted in refreshing candor: “We really messed up. We should have done a much better job taking into account the feelings of the employees and community”.