Arthur Dove/Helen Torr Cottage

Arthur Dove and Helen Torr are the artists most closely associated with the Town of Huntington. Born in New York's Finger Lakes region, Dove gave up law studies to pursue art, initially working as an illustrator before traveling to France in 1907 where he saw the work of the Fauves and Cézanne. Back in the States, he began a long association with Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited the artist's work at his New York galleries. Beginning about 1920, Dove and his second wife, the artist Helen Torr, lived aboard their yawl Mona, sailing and painting along the Long Island Sound in Huntington, Centerport, Northport, and Lloyd Harbors and wintering at the Ketewomoke Yacht Club in Halesite, NY. In 1934, they moved to Geneva, NY, Dove’s hometown, to settle his mother’s estate, returning to Long Island in 1938, at which time they purchased the small cottage on Titus Mill Pond in Centerport where they lived until the end of their lives.

Dove was one of the earliest artists to paint pure abstractions, developing a non-representational style in the years before the Armory Show. In his "extractions," as he called them, Dove sought to express the essential spirit of nature using simplified forms and colors distilled from the observed landscape. His works powerfully evoke nuances of weather and climate, and his diaries carefully record weather conditions, as well as the day’s activities.

Like Dove, Torr's subjects are abstracted from nature, although her work is characterized by stronger rhythmic, lyrical, and decorative qualities than Dove's. Torr exhibited little during her lifetime, but after her death, her work was brought to the attention of then Heckscher Museum Director Eva Gatling, who mounted an exhibition of the artist’s work, beginning a reappraisal that has restored Torr's place next to Dove’s among America's early modernists.