James Fitzgerald – Rockwell Kent Historic Artists’ Home and Studio, Monhegan Museum of Art & History


1 Lighthouse Hill, Monhegan Island, ME 04852

207-596-7003

The James Fitzgerald – Rockwell Kent House and Studio were designed and built by Rockwell Kent during the years 1906 to 1910 for his own use. The studio, built by Kent as an art school, was subsequently used and owned by his cousin, the painter Alice Kent Stoddard. The artist James Fitzgerald acquired the studio in 1952 and the house in 1958. Both buildings, which are on the National Register of Historic Places, are open to the public on a limited basis each week during the summer. The Kent-Fitzgerald house includes original furnishings and personal effects of the artists, and in the studio, paintings by James Fitzgerald are displayed as well as his original artist materials.

Rockwell Kent standing in the doorway of a house he built on Monhegan. Circa 1907. Mary Kelsey Album, MMAH, Gift of Lois Herndon, 1992.
Alice Kent Stoddard, circa 1910. MMAH, Gift of Barbara Stanley, 1999.
James Fitzgerald on the beach in Monhegan, Maine, circa 1962. James Fitzgerald papers, 1905-1992. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Rockwell Kent studied architecture at Columbia University and painting with William Merritt Chase at Shinnecock, and with Robert Henri and Kenneth H. Miller at the New York School of Art. During the summer of 1903, he apprenticed with Abbott Thayer in Dublin, New Hampshire, and in 1905 he made his first journey to Monhegan at the recommendation of Henri. Kent spent much of each year on the island from 1905 until 1910 and returned briefly in 1917 and 1947. In 1948, he bought back the house he had built on the island in 1906 and spent time painting on the island each year until 1953. During this later period, Kent’s political activities created a barrier for him on the island and he did not “take to” the community the way he had during his earlier years, nor was he universally welcomed.

Born in Watertown, CT, Alice Kent Stoddard spent many years in Philadelphia studying with William Sartain and Elliott Daingerfield at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now the Moore College of Art and Design), and then with William Merritt Chase and Cecilia Beaux at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the first decade of the twentieth century. At PAFA she won the First Toppan Prize in 1905, a traveling scholarship in 1905-1907, and two Mary Smith Prizes. She first visited Monhegan in 1909, and began painting the island that summer. Stoddard won awards and accolades for many of her Monhegan portraits including Gerald Stanley Lee, A Fisherman’s Sister, Child of Monhegan, and Fisherman Playing Cards. Stoddard was listed in Who’s Who in American Art the first year any women were listed in the book, and she was one of only four Monhegan women painters elected to the National Academy. 

James Fitzgerald studied at the Massachusetts School of Art and then at the Boston Museum School. During the summer, while he was enrolled at the Boston Museum School, Fitzgerald maintained a studio with several artists, including Lee Winslow Court, with whom Fitzgerald would also share a studio on Monhegan in 1925. In 1929, Fitzgerald moved to Monterey, California, where he became involved with a group of intellectuals and artists which included John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, Joseph Campbell, Edward Weston, and John Cage. Fitzgerald established his permanent residence on Monhegan in 1943 and lived primarily on the island for the rest of his life, acquiring first the studio, and then the house that Rockwell Kent built for himself in the early 1900s.

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), Village at Night, circa 1950, oil on panel, 12 x 16 in. MMAH, Gift of Remak Ramsay.
Alice Kent Stoddard (1883-1976), Mending Nets, n.d., oil on canvas panel, 20 ¼ x 24 ½ in. MMAH, Bequest of Elizabeth B. Noyce.
James Fitzgerald (1899-1971), Monhegan Fisherman, circa 1950, Watercolor on paper, 25 x 29 ½ in. MMAH, James Fitzgerald Legacy, Gift of Anne Hubert.
From left to right: Jessie Dunbar, unknown, Alice Stoddard, unknown in studio, 1913. Above the fireplace is a Caproni plaster cast from the Parthenon frieze that was placed by Rockwell Kent. Wik Wak Album, 1913. MMAH, Gift of Len and Meredith Allen.
Fitzgerald Legacy Archives, MMAH.

Rockwell Kent designed, built, and used this house and studio on Monhegan’s Horn’s Hill, and here he not only created some of his best-known works (e.g. Winter, Monhegan Island [1907], Metropolitan Museum of Art), but also recognized and first fully expressed his nascent political beliefs and socialism. The house is interpreted much as it appeared in Kent’s first sojourn, 1906-1910, with his period furnishings, allowing us to tell the story of Kent’s Monhegan experience and its influence on his life’s work.

Alice Kent Stoddard, a portrait artist and landscape painter, lived in and used the studio from 1912 until 1946. First cousin of Rockwell Kent, Stoddard came to Monhegan to visit her aunt (Kent’s mother) in 1909, and continued to spend time on the island for 65 years, depicting both the island vistas, and generations of residents with her insightful landscapes, seascapes, and portraits.

James Fitzgerald first visited Monhegan in 1924 as an art student, but did not make his home on the island until 1943. He was not a plein air painter. Observing his subject matter outdoors, he returned to the studio to recreate images from a mental template. The studio largely appears the way it did when he walked out the door shortly before his death, allowing us to tell the story not only of his life, but of his artistic process, while presenting rotating exhibitions of his work.