Arthur Dove / Helen Torr Cottage, Heckscher Museum of Art

Arthur Garfield Dove (1880–1946)

Helen Torr (1886–1967)

Dove / Torr Cottage, 30 Centershore Road, Centerport, NY 11721

Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue, Huntington, NY 11743

631-380-3230

ABOUT

A small cottage on the banks of Titus Mill Pond in Centerport, just three miles from The Heckscher Museum of Art. A Soundwalk experience is available at the site where visitors can listen closer to the natural environment surrounding the cottage as well as excerpts from journal entries and quotes from Arthur G. Dove and Helen Torr.

SPECIAL RESOURCES

_{Arthur Dove and Helen Torr. Courtesy of The Heckscher Museum of Art.}

“I love this swashbuckling around the salt water…everyone seems quite delighted with this place. It is beautiful.”

— Arthur G. Dove

“We feel this is the loveliest situation we have ever had.”

— Helen Torr

Arthur Garfield Dove (1880–1946)

Arthur G. Dove was an early American modernist, and is often considered the first American abstract painter. Dove sought to express the essential spirit of nature using simplified forms and colors distilled from the observed landscape.

Helen Torr (1886–1967)

Helen Torr studied art in Philadelphia beginning in 1902 first at the Drexel Institute and then at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. She met Arthur Dove and began sketching with him, marrying in 1921. Like Dove, Torr’s subjects are abstracted from nature, although her work is characterized by stronger rhythmic, lyrical, and decorative qualities than Dove’s.

_{“Oyster Stakes” by Helen Torr, 1929, oil on paperboard. Gift of Mrs. Mary Rehm. Courtesy of The Heckscher Museum of Art.}

_{An image of the Dove/Torr Cottage from 1938. Courtesy of The Heckscher Museum of Art.}

_{Courtesy of The Heckscher Museum of Art.}

LEARN MORE

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.

IN COLLABORATION WITH THE NATIONAL TRUST