Essay
Provenance
Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York
Private collection, Tennessee
Celebrated for his uniquely American Impressionistic style, Guy Wiggins’s vibrant harbor scenes and cityscapes captured the movement and color of the early-twentieth century. The son of the landscape painter Carleton Wiggins, Guy honed his technique under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri and drew inspiration from the French Impressionist movement. Charged with energy, his idealized depictions of Massachusetts ports and New York avenues proved extremely popular, earning him honors throughout his career. At the age of twenty, Wiggins became the youngest artist to have his work accepted into The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection, and he soon won prizes from the Salmagundi Club, Rhode Island School of Design, and Art Institute of Chicago.
Easterly Winds, Gloucester is representative of Wiggins’ celebrated early style in terms of paint application, color, and compositional organization. The artist created this rare harbor scene through the use of brilliant, sumptuous hues of turquoise and blue molded into a texture of thick impasto. The bold use of saturated color, as well as the frenetic brushwork that signals the artist’s technique and presence, relates to the Impressionist works of Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. Wiggins’ youthful originality also accounts for the inventive and playful viewpoint from which the work is created; as the viewer’s sight is dominated by two large sailboats in the middle ground, the impression of a third boat glides into the right corner of the composition. In this snap-shot like moment, Wiggins’ places both himself and his viewer aboard the third sailboat being launched from the shores of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.
Wiggins’ creation of a dynamic and radiant seaport in Easterly Winds, Gloucester attests to the artist’s technical skill and reveals why his earlier harbor scenes are eagerly sought after. Painted during the time in which Wiggins was heralded as the youngest artist to have works accepted by the revered Metropolitan Museum of Art, Easterly Winds exhibits the strong spirit of innovation found in the artist’s early compositions. Today, Wiggins’ exceptional Impressionistic works form part of the White House and Smithsonian American Art Museum collections.
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