01/15/2025
The Post-Impressionist artist, Dodge Macknight (1860-1950), one of the earliest American Modernist painters and the foremost watercolorist of his day, who lived more than half of his long life in East Sandwich, is now mostly overlooked. His reputation did not last, at least in comparison to his contemporaries Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, whose paintings were exhibited along with Macknight’s vibrant landscapes.
Boston collectors once clamored to acquire his art from galleries and his watercolors are now in the permanent collections of many prominent museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, Boston Museums of Fine Arts, and, most notably, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It is in the Fenway Court that Gardner devoted a room to Macknight, the only modern artist so honored in her palazzo. She kept her office there surrounded not only by the art of her contemporaries - the fellow artists of Macknight’s circle - but also objects collected during her extensive travels.
Gardner and Macknight were kindred souls as adventurous world travelers. But unlike the wealthy-born New York heiress, the artist had humble origins in Providence, Rhode Island. He started his career as an artist there and in New Bedford, Massachusetts, first as a theatrical scene painter and then by reproducing paintings and photographs. Almost penniless, Macknight made his way to France to continue his artistic studies. There he met John Peter Russell, the Australian Impressionist painter and portraitist who introduced him to Vincent van Gogh. Macknight settled for a time in the south of France in Fontvieille but never took up the Dutchman’s invitation to join the artistic community in Arles. Still, the two artists talked of revolutionary color theory (seen in their works) and were friends.
Macknight married Louise Queyrel, the French governess of his friend Russell. Their only child was John. The young family moved to Spain as Macknight continued his travels, including to Algeria and Morocco.
With the growing tensions of the Spanish-American War, the Dodges left for America in 1900, first settling briefly in Mystic, Connecticut before moving to East Sandwich the next year. They set up home in the Barnabas Nye House (ca. 1763), which was also once the Quaker school of Joseph and Mercy Wing. The beloved home and gardens were called “The Hedges.” Now known as “Hedgerow,” it still stands at 260 Route 6A, part of the Spring Hill Historic District, one of nearly 500 historic structures that line the length of the Old King’s Highway Historic District. In the Sandwich Historical Society collections is a rare contemporary view of “The Hedges.”
It was here, in East Sandwich, that Macknight reached the height of his popularity and commercial viability in the 1920s. But with the death of his great friend and patron, Gardner, followed by his son and then his wife, along with changing collecting tastes, the artist largely put down his paint brushes. Harvard Art Museums hold a few lovely watercolors of the Spring Hill landscape. These are vivid reminders of his love of nature and working out-of-doors, if a long way from the American West, Mexico, and the wilder parts of New Hampshire and Quebec where he traveled to paint after settling in East Sandwich.
While not quite forgotten in Sandwich, remembered because much of his estate went to the Public Library, and the Sandwich Historical Society of the Glass Museum holds some significant pieces of his life, Macknight might be poised for a reappraisal. Macknight makes a few appearances along with Cape Cod (but not Sandwich) in Emily Franklin’s popular The Lioness of Boston: A Novel of 2023. In the new biography of 2024, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra, Macknight receives more attention. His friend, John Peter Russell died in Australia in obscurity but has recently been the focus of much interest, including a documentary and in the collecting of his Impressionist work.
Russell painted a portrait of Macknight as a young man. The Sandwich Historical Society has perhaps the only other known image of Dodge Macknight, a charcoal sketch (1930) by the illustrator and printmaker Raymond Moreau Crosby. In addition, notes on Macknight by Marise Fawsett, historian and business owner (of Christmas Shop fame), are housed in the Sandwich Historical Commission Archives in the Sandwich Public Library. The town would be a good place to start a more complete assessment and celebration of the life of Dodge Macknight.
