Impressions of the Jersey Shore

For American impressionists, New Jersey was to Philadelphia and New York what Brittany and Normandy were to Paris: a great place to take advantage of the quality of the light. Women in white gazing out at the seashore was classical subject matter.

By:Ilene Dube
   When people think of the Jersey Shore, they think of Bruce Springsteen and suntan lotion.
   "What they are missing is that the shore has traditionally been a favorite spot for impressionist painters," says Roy Pedersen of Pedersen Gallery in Lambertville. "When Monet painted a harbor scene, it was the first time the term impressionism was used."

Above, the Jersey Shore painted by Ida Stroud in 1930.

   The Pedersen Gallery is exhibiting the work of American impressionist painters Ida Wells Stroud (1869-1944) and her daughter, Clara Stroud (1890-1984).
   "It is hard to consider their careers separately," says Mr. Pedersen. The paintings of these women, who lived and worked at the Jersey Shore, has not been publicly viewed in 50 years.
   "The quality of light where the beach and the shore meet has been a natural subject for painters," says Mr. Pedersen, who is working on a book about impressionist painters of the Jersey Shore. "In the 1880s and 1890s, the great impressionists — Gaugin and Van Gogh — weren’t in Paris, they were in Brittany and Normandy and other seaside rural communities. That is the context that New Jersey can be seen in — what Brittany and Normandy are to Paris, New Jersey is to New York and Philadelphia, a great place to take advantage of the quality of light."
   According to Mr. Pedersen, the greatest painting in 19th and 20th century America took place not in the cities, but in rural areas. "The National Academy of Design this spring rediscovered the Cos Cob School" in Connecticut, he says. "These were great American impressionists from 1890 to 1915. One of the most celebrated was of a water scene and it was used on the cover of the catalog. But it was actually painted in New Jersey. No one knows this because we haven’t looked at our own history."

Above, Shore houses by Ida Stroud, 1915.

   Mr. Pedersen knows the painting’s true origin because he grew up in Brielle on the Jersey Shore. He studied psychology at Brown University and worked briefly with juvenile delinquents before realizing his passion was in rediscovering artists whose work has been overlooked.
   "I was the first to rediscover Arthur Wesley Dow, Georgia O’Keeffe’s teacher," he says. "Dow introduced the ideas of Japanese composition into American art in the 1890s. But he had fallen out of attention by the 1980s, and the National Gallery put the nail in his coffin by calling him ‘an important teacher but an unimportant artist.’"
   Mr. Pedersen found a relative of Dow’s in northern New Jersey who had come into possession of most of his works. After the two launched a major exhibition of Dow’s work at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, the Metropolitan Museum called Dow one of the most important artists working at the turn of the century.
   Arthur Dow had been a teacher of Ida and Clara Stroud at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and it was from Dow that the women learned about Japanese composition.
   As an art dealer in the area for more than 20 years, Mr. Pedersen saw the prices of Bucks County paintings go through the roof. He observed that regional painting was taking off and thought New Jersey residents might be happier with artists from their own state.
   "The last book published on New Jersey art was in 1964," he says, scratching his head. "And the last before that was in 1930."

Classical subjects of the great impressionists were women in white gazing out at the seaside. Clara Stroud painted this scene at Point Pleasant in 1920.

   His faith in New Jersey impressionism went undaunted. "Winslow Homer, the father of American impressionism, painted in Long Branch in 1869, on site in bright sunlight, with the classical subject matter of women in white looking out over the beach. Thomas Eakins’ paintings of rowing on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia have their origins in his youth growing up in South Jersey, where he enjoyed fishing and rowing. The golden age of landscape painting at the Jersey Shore was 1880-1940. That’s where Ida and Clara Stroud fit in."
   Ida Wells was born in New Orleans and grew up at the height of the women’s suffrage movement. She moved north when her young husband died suddenly and studied at the Art Students League with William Merritt Chase, and at Pratt. She went on to teach at Pratt, then the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts and the Summer School of Art at Syracuse University in New York.
   Clara also studied at Pratt and designed covers for Gustav Stickley’s Craftsmen magazine. In 1920, Clara and her husband bought one of the oldest houses in Point Pleasant, where she formed the Stroud Studio and held exhibitions and classes, often accompanied by her mother.
   Several years later, the couple divorced, and Ida began spending summers at the shore house, where mother and daughter resumed their joint career.

Above, a landscape by Idea Stroud.

   Prior to the time of Ida and Clara Stroud, landscape had been the domain of men while women painted still life, Mr. Pedersen points out. "The Strouds painted with a high-key palette," which was part of the Japanese influence. Ida painted posters, using the flat style she had learned from Dow.
   While the paintings are filled with impressionistic brush strokes, they employ the wild colors of the fauvists. "Fauve painting uses bright colors applied in terms of decorative composition rather than realism. Fauve is literally translated as ‘wild beast’ — it is not contained by reality."
   The paintings are filled with rainbow-colored houses on piers over deep blue water with wavy black shadows — a blue so deep it could only exist in the painter’s palette. The water is flat with no waves or whitecaps. In "Away," turquoise and lavender houses with purple roofs are tucked at the end of a tangerine-colored road, dwarfed by tall trees against a cobalt sky.
   "The Ferry" is a canvas of brightly colored boats with pink and orange roofs against tall gray buildings.
   "Whistler said the finest work of art is accomplished with the minimum number of strokes," says Mr. Pedersen. "It makes what’s on the paper all the stronger. Matisse said a painting is done when you can’t take anything else away from it. These paintings have that kind of minimalism to them."
   Ida Wells Stroud and Clara Stroud: The Woman’s Era is on view at the Pedersen Gallery, 17 N. Union St., Lambertville, through July 8. Hours: Sat.-Sun. noon-5 p.m. and by appointment. For information, call (609) 397-1332. From there it travels to the Noyes Museum in Oceanville, July 22-Sept. 23. For information, call (609) 652-8848.