Past Exhibitions

The Odyssey of James Fitzgerald

In the summer of 2022, the Monhegan Museum of Art & History will celebrate the life and art of James Fitzgerald (1899-1971) in a retrospective exhibition of his watercolors and oil paintings. It will begin with early sketches from his time as a student at the Massachusetts College of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and continue with paintings from Monterey, California, where he relocated in 1929 and became part of a community of artists and writers known as the Cannery Row Circle. The exhibition will focus especially on Fitzgerald’s paintings of Monhegan Island, which he visited several times in the 1930’s before making the island his permanent residence. With the help of his good friends and patrons, Anne and Edgar Hubert, he purchased a home and studio built by Rockwell Kent- buildings that are now part of the Monhegan Museum of Art & History.  Fitzgerald’s Monhegan paintings were informed by his close observation of the place and the people, and by his interest in Asian art and philosophy, which he first encountered in California. The exhibition will also include paintings from Fitzgerald’s annual trips to Maine’s Mount Katahdin and from his visits to the Aran Islands in Ireland, near the end of his life, where he continued to explore his lifelong interest in the power of nature, and man’s relationship to the sea.