<body><div>Fifty years after artist Russell Cheney suffered a massive heart attack at his Kittery home and died, his reputation as a "New England master" was revived in a 1996 exhibit at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.The scholarship that resulted flowered into the current exhibit at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, "Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting."Former Athenaeum President Joseph W. P. Frost (1923-2008) was a collector of Cheney’s work. Frost provided several canvases to Athenaeum member Patricia L. Heard (1930-2011), whose exhibit on Cheney opened the Peter Randall Gallery at the Athenaeum in June 1996.Heard's public lecture on “Russell Cheney: Artist of the Piscataqua” lives online (slightly updated by Athenaeum member Richard Candee) on the website RussellCheney.com designed by his great-niece Carol L. Cheney and Candee.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2dNAmL_0wBrXb4900" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2dNAmL_0wBrXb4900" width="612" height="480" ><figcaption>Russell Cheney painted "Bow Street" around 1930. Cheney (1881-1945) would often attract a crowd when he set up his easel in Portsmouth.</figcaption></figure>The website has inspired many people to send photographs of Cheney's works, which now total some 1,179."As we look at the Portsmouth, New Castle, York and Kittery paintings of Russell Cheney, we are not only looking back into our own recent past, we are also seeing these landscapes through his fond and observant eye," Heard wrote.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=3Xr9OI_0wBrXb4900" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=3Xr9OI_0wBrXb4900" width="640" height="426" ><figcaption>Portsmouth's Gov. John Langdon Mansion is prominently featured in this 1938 painting titled “Strawberry Bank” by artist Russell Cheney. It is in a private collection.</figcaption></figure>In 2008, Candee curated two exhibits of 87 paintings, “Russell Cheney -- A New England Master; Northern New England Paintings 1910-45."Cheney was a familiar sight on the streets of Portsmouth; a crowd often gathered around his easel as he painted.The Athenaeum’s Randall Gallery exhibited 38 works from Kittery and southern Maine, while the Portsmouth Historical Society’s venue in the city's old public library held the remaining 49 works of Portsmouth and the New Hampshire Seacoast.These paired exhibits, along with a one-day symposium in 2008 that offered access to Cheney’s home and studio in Kittery, Maine, explored the artist's evolution from Impressionism to Yankee Modernism."Nearly all the subsequent research into Cheney’s art has been undertaken by those 2008 participants and their students," said Candee, a past president of the Portsmouth Historical Society and professor emeritus of American and New England Studies at Boston University.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1mVNhi_0wBrXb4900" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1mVNhi_0wBrXb4900" width="640" height="460" ><figcaption>"Back of North Church" was painted by Kittery artist Russell Cheney, whose work is featured in an exhibit at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. "Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting" runs through Nov. 17.</figcaption></figure>This season's exhibit in Ogunquit, which runs through Nov. 17, was organized by Kevin D. Murphy, once one of Candee’s BU graduate students. Murphy is now head of the art history department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. There he offers a seminar on exhibiting works of American art; his students research and organize an exhibition and its catalog.As the Vanderbilt University art gallery was temporarily closed the last academic year, the Ogunquit Museum was the beneficiary of Dr. Murphy and his students' work.The resulting book, "Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting" includes essays by Murphy, Candee, and Scott Bane.Bane, who in 2022 published "A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney," had also attended the 2008 symposium in Kittery.In the intervening years, the trio of scholars shared their research into more than 3,000 letters between Cheney and Matthiessen, plus correspondence with several of their friends.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=3IzXSl_0wBrXb4900" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=3IzXSl_0wBrXb4900" width="640" height="450" ><figcaption>This circa 1935-1937 by artist Russell Cheney of South Mill Bridge in Portsmouth is in the area where Sanders Olde Mill Fish Market (former site of the Marconi family's Blue Fin Fish Market) now stands.</figcaption></figure>Cheney and Matthiessen, both Yale graduates, met in 1924 on a ship to Venice. Matthiessen was 22 and headed to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Cheney, 43, was looking to renew his career as an artist after fighting tuberculosis and a growing addiction to alcohol.Matthiessen went on to become a literary critic and a teacher at Harvard.The two began a summer life together in 1927 in Kittery Point and later bought a home on Old Ferry Lane in Kittery. Cheney's family, which owned silk mills in Connecticut, had long owned a summer home in York Harbor.The Ogunquit gallery has 30-some of Cheney's works on display and has produced the very first catalog of Cheney’s art in full color. The catalog essays include comparative illustrations of dozens of his other paintings.The Portsmouth Athenaeum, 9 Market Square, is a nonprofit membership library founded in 1817. It has 40,000-plus volumes, and an archive of local history materials. The photographic collection contains over 36,000 images available for viewing at portsmouthathenaeum.org. The Shaw Research Library and Randall Gallery are open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 1-4 p.m. For more information, go to the website or call 603-431-2538.This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Artist of the Piscataqua’s work lives on: At the Portsmouth Athenaeum</div></body>

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Artist of the Piscataqua’s work lives on: At the Portsmouth Athenaeum

Fifty years after artist Russell Cheney suffered a massive heart attack at his Kittery home and died, his reputation as a \"New England master\" was revived in a 1996 exhibit at the Portsmouth Athenaeum. The scholarship that resulted flowered into the current exhibit at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art,...

Fifty years after artist Russell Cheney suffered a massive heart attack at his Kittery home and died, his reputation as a "New England master" was revived in a 1996 exhibit at the Portsmouth Athenaeum. The scholarship that resulted flowered into the current exhibit at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art,...