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The Farnsworth Museum houses one of the finest collections of American nineteenth- and twentieth-century prints in the region. It includes etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, serigraphs and monotypes. A collection of more than 100 wood engravings by Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847), the self-taught artist and pioneer pastor of the First Congregational Church in Bluehill, Maine, are among the earliest fine art prints in the country. Many of them were published in 1834 in his Scripture Animals, an educational and religious guide for young people. Together with Fisher's paintings and writings these prints provide a fascinating glimpse into life on the edge of civilization at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Works by James McNeil Whistler, Charles Woodbury, Frank Benson, Childe Hassam and Winslow Homer, comprise the Farnsworth's holdings of late nineteenth-century prints. Several large remarqued etchings from the 1880s by Homer are of special interest. Graphic works by the American Realists and early Modernists are also amply represented in the collection with pieces by George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, William and Marguerite Zorach. A complete set of the prints and all the original woodblocks of Caroll Thayer Berry, Leo Meissner and Pauline Inman, all of whom either lived or summered in Maine, are among the most interesting holdings within the print collection. Other prints from this mid-twentieth century time period include works by artists such as Leonard Baskin, Stow Wengenroth, Sears Gallagher, Kevin O'Callahan, Kerr Eby and Linwood Easton. Prints from the Farnsworth's contemporary holdings are among the most dynamic in the collection and include a selection of seminal pieces by Robert Indiana, a resident of Vinalhaven, an island in Penobscott Bay near Rockland. Many of these prints were produced at the Vinalhaven Press, one of the country's leading fine art presses that flourished during the 1980s and '90s. Works by such Vinalhaven Press artists as Charlie Hewitt, Louisa Chase, Mel Chin, Susan Crile, Carolyn Brady and Robert Cummings, among many others, are a major component in the Farnsworth's collection of contemporary graphics. |
