PORT TOWNSEND — Never mind the corsets, the long skirts, the beach logs and wet grass. These women got out there and made art amid the elements, and they left it to future generations.
“Women Outdoors: Field, Forest, and Shore,” an exhibition of 21 drawings and paintings from Victorian-era Port Townsend, is all about wide-open spaces.
So it’s ironic to find it in the former Women’s Jail, a small gallery deep inside the Jefferson Museum of Art & History.
But these images, said Jenny Westdal, Jefferson County Historical Society board president, reflect an early wave of artistry in Port Townsend.
The city “is an art colony now; it took off in the ’70s,” she added.
But what some may not realize is that artists were finding abundant inspiration in Port Townsend back in the 1890s.
It was a contemporary show that inspired Westdal and curator Ann Welch.
Earlier this year, local artist Maria Coryell-Martin mounted her exhibition, “Witnessing Climate Change,” in the museum’s main-floor gallery.
She’s an expeditionary artist who has worked outdoors on Alaska’s Cooper Island, capturing filtered Arctic light and pastel skies.
Coryell-Martin’s exhibit, which opened in August and will stay through December, sent Welch and Westdal into the museum vaults, looking for female art pioneers.
They brought out paintings by Adeline Willoughby McCormack (1871-1954) and her peers.
These works form the “Women Outdoors” exhibition at the museum, 540 Water St., where galleries are open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays.
McCormack was a student of Harriet Foster Beecher, an influential artist and teacher who came over from Seattle.
Beecher was an elegant, sophisticated woman who went to the University of Washington to teach, Westdal added. But there weren’t enough students to support an art school; it was in Port Townsend, where Beecher settled with her husband, that she found the young women who wanted to study painting.
McCormack in turn opened her own studio in 1898, and she taught the next generation of art students until 1930. Many of her classes were conducted outside, Westdal noted.
Images of North Beach, Discovery Bay, Mount Baker and the Point Wilson lighthouse all appear in the exhibition, which includes watercolors painted on site alongside oil paintings done later.
Much like Coryell-Martin did in Alaska, these artists of 120-plus years ago made paintings or sketches in the field, and they sometimes worked from them when they got back into their studios.
During Beecher and Willoughby’s era, an invention made all the difference. John Goffe Rand had developed metal paint tubes in 1841, providing artists with portable, longer-lasting colors — much easier to use than the hand-ground pigments carried in pig bladders or glass syringes.
The French Impressionists took those tin tubes outdoors in the 1860s, to be followed a few decades later by Beecher and her students on the North Olympic Peninsula.
These artists still had to contend, of course, with weather and terrain. They did so without automobiles or Gore-Tex.
“The women represented in the exhibit were really trailblazers,” Welch said.
“Making art is not for the timid … Many of the locations where they painted weren’t as easily accessible as they are now, and there was some serious trudging and toting to get to a location to paint.”
“Women Outdoors: Field, Forest, and Shore” will stay on display at the Jefferson Museum of Art & History through Dec. 31. Admission is $6 general, $5 for seniors and $1 for children ages 3 to 17, while visits are free for Jefferson County Historical Society members.
Information about membership and other historical society activities can be found at JCHSmuseum.org or by phoning 360-385-1003.
________
Jefferson County senior reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladaily news.com.
