History of the New Hope Colony
In 1896, Philadelphia surgeon Dr. George Morley Marshall purchased the Phillips’ Mill in Solebury Township, PA. The property included a grist mill with water rights and glen, a dam, a pond, a section of the Primrose Creek and a 40-foot waterfall which fed the mill race to run the two waterwheels.
William Langson Lathrop (1859–1938)
A year later, Dr. Marshall invited his friend, landscape artist William Langson Lathrop, to visit and explore his new home. Lathrop and his wife, Annie Sarah Burt, accepted the invitation, renting the miller’s house on Marshall’s property. The Langsons loved the area so much, they decided to stay. They purchased the house and the surrounding 4 acres of farmland in 1899.
"Mister Lathrop's idea of a great picture is that it should touch the heart. The touchstone of all good painting, like that of all good writing or good living, is love in one form or another. It may be love of skies or of rail fences or mere love of painting. But without it, any art is superficial and short lived." The Bristol Daily Courier, Oct 11, 1916
Oil Painting of Phillips Mill by William Langson Lathrop
William Lathrop soon began teaching art classes in his home studio. In time, other artists began to settle in the area, drawn by Lathrop’s reputation and recommendation. These early artists included Morgan Colt, Edward Redfield, Daniel Garber, Charles Rosen, Henry Snell, John Folinsbee, Mary Elizabeth Price, and Fern Coppedge.
Lathrop was a tonalist painter. He rarely painted directly from nature. Instead he took many nature walks, where he would make drawings which he would later incorporate into his paintings while in the studio. Sometimes he took months to finish one canvas.
"One would not write a poem from nature, So why should a painting be made from nature any more than a poem. One thinks and digests something one is about to write. So I like to think and browse over my painting before I put it on canvas. I take many liberties with the scene...I get the feeling of the place. Make some hasty pencil sketches and then paint." William Langson Lathrop
Painting of the Tow Path by William Langson Lathrop
The Lathrop home soon served as the social focus of the growing art colony. His wife, Annie, entertained artists with Sunday afternoon teas which became a popular forum for exchanging ideas about art.
Sunday afternoons, the Lathrops' lawn was a collecting place at tea-time and someone remembered nostalgically only the other day how the fine, almost lost art of conversation flourished there." -Martha Candler Cheney
The group of artists came to be known nationally as the New Hope Group exhibiting together from 1916-1926. Locals dubbed them the Towpath Group. These artist specialized in Plein Air painting, the practice of painting finished landscapes or other subjects outdoors, capturing the essence of the scene through natural light, color, and movement.
In 1929, the group formally organized and founded the Phillips’ Mill Community Association. They purchased the mill from Dr. Marshall and on May 25 of that year, the first Exhibition was held at Philips’ Mill with 125 works exhibited by 41 artists. William Lathrop was the first president of the Phillips Mill Community Association, 1929.
"If I felt I knew how to paint, I should lose interest in painting. It is the untested possibilities that keep me striving." William Langson Lathrop, The Bristol Daily Courier, Oct 11, 1916.
Along the Delaware by William Langson Lathrop
Morgan Colt (1876-1926)
Morgan Colt was an American metalworker, furniture craftsman, impressionist painter, and architect. He and his wife, Jane Boudinot Keith, eventually decided to move to New Hope in 1912. Colt purchased land from Lathrop and transformed some old ruins on the property.
Colt built an English Tudor house across from the mill and added a gatehouse cottage and his Gothic Revival style artist studio using the wooden trusses of a ruined English abbey.
Colt Residence in New Hope, The Little English Village
Across from the studio, he built a Gothic Revival iron forge where he crafted iron furniture and a brick Tudor Revival style woodworking shop where he made wood furniture and chests.
In 1919, Colt added more buildings to the Little English Village which he called the Gothic Shops. There he exhibited and sold his garden furniture, ornamental ironwork, tooled copper, leather work, and carved wood chests, doors, and painted furniture.
Edward Redfield (1869-1965)
At nthe turn of the century, Edward Redfield was considered the leading American painter of landscapes. He settled near New Hope in Centre Bridge in 1898 with his French wife, Elise Deligant. They moved into a house along the tow path on a strip of land between the canal and the river. The island farm included a 112 acres.
He said he came to Centre Bridge, "not for the beauty of the countryside, but because this was a place where an independent self-sufficient man could make a living from the land, bring up a family and still have the freedom to paint as he saw fit."
Redfield specialized in painting snow scenes in the outdoors. It was so cold that his paint often froze in the tubes. "You have to reduce it with a great deal of oil in order to make it soft enough to manipulate. It's quite a job to cover a canvas that size with small brushes. And mix the many mixes that you make. And you are drawing the same time that you are painting." Edward Redfield
Oil Painting of Centre Bridge by Edward Redfield 1907
Redfield was proud of his ability to complete a 50 x 56 inch painting in one sitting. He made no preliminary sketches, but before he began he would have spent days visiting the site, choosing his viewpoint, studying its nuances, and carefully planning how to paint it so that he could be ready to capture the light of an exact time of day as it appeared before his eyes.
"My equipment weighed 40 50 pounds. If you worked in winter we would wear these heavy knitted stockings, heavy woolen undercoats, courduroy pants, a shirt, a sweater, a coat and on top of that a sheepskin coat and pulse warmers made specially with the fingers cutout...On the palette hand, a heavy glove. Those big canvases have a cross bar with them. I'd put them on my head and walk going through snow. A mile is about as far as you want to travel." Edward Redfield Oral History
"What I wanted to do was go outdoors and capture the look of a scene, Whether it was a barn or bridge, as it looked on a certain day." Edward Redfield, The Bristol Daily Courier, Oct 20, 1965.
Winter Afternoon by Edward Redfield
Daniel Garber (1880-1958)
Daniel Garber and his wife, Mary Franklin, came to the New Hope area in 1907 at Lathrop's suggestion. They settled in Solebury Township, just down river from Lumberville and six miles up river from New Hope.
Garber named the complex of buildings on his property, Cuttalossa, after the river which ran through it. There was an old house, mill and barn/studio with large French doors.
“People talk about impulse, about impressions, but that isn’t personal with me. It is the study of a subject that appeals to me rather than any quick notebook impression of it.” Daniel Garber
Oil Painting of Lumberville by Daniel Garber, 1941
Unlike many of the other New Hope artists, Graber rarely painted winter landscapes. He spent his winters at his Green Street residence in Philadelphia. There he taught at the Pennsylvania Academy.
Garber became noted for his large exhibition landscapes, but he also created small works. Garber, alone among the New Hope painters, did portrait work featuring family members set in his home environment.
The Cottage at Cutalossa by Daniel Garber
Charles Rosen (1878-1950)
In 1903, Charles Rosen married Mildred Holden and moved to the New Hope area, renting Glen Cottage from William Lathrop at the Phillips Mill complex. In 1915, he built a home between the Delaware Canal and the Delaware River, also at Phillips' Mill, near New Hope. Here he became known for his large impressionist winter landscapes.
Rosen painted in Plein Air. He carried his large canvases outdoors, painting directly from nature without making sketches. However, unlike Redfield he did not try to complete his paintings in one day. Rather he often brought them back to the studio to finish.
"Rosen's landscapes were extremely varied. Sometimes they were spontaneous, thrown off quickly, and sometimes carefully worked. Some paintings were full of movement and others were serenely calm. Some are almost monochrome while some explode with color."
Oil painting of the Delaware River near New Hope by Charles Rosen, 1910
By 1910, Rosen had determined that he was no longer satisfied with his Impressionist style. He began to experiment with other styles of painting, eventually abandoning impressionism for a cubist-realist style.
"Rosen was considering form in relation to warm and cool colors, lost and found edges, all of which contributed to intensify the illusion of space on flat canvas. Abstraction had gained for him a new importance." -John Folinsbee
View from the Back Porch by Charles Rosen, 1930
Henry Snell (1858-1943)
Henry Snell and his wife Florence, also a painter, first saw Bucks County when visiting long-time friends, William and Annie Lathrop in 1898.
After visiting for several summers, the Snells finally settled in the top floor of the Solebury Bank building in New Hope in 1926. Here Snell set up a studio.
His home and studio were located at the foot of the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge and many of Snell’s New Hope scenes were painted from this location.
John Fulton Folinsbee (1892-1972)
In 1924, John Folinsbee bought a piece of property along the Delaware River on Main Street in New Hope where he and his wife, Ruth Baldwin, had a home designed and built by artist and architect, Morgan Colt.
After contracting polio as a teenager, Folinsbee was wheelchair bound. From his wheelchair, Folinsbee could manage making paintings as large as 24 X 30 out of doors.
"To paint a large work, he would lean a canvas against the studio wall and sit on the floor before it, his withered legs tucked under him. Relying on notes made on the spot about color and light, he would edit the scene as he painted, emphasizing or eliminating elements to enhance the overall mood."
Studio Terrace by John Folinsbee, 1929
Larger works were painted in his studio from drawings and oil sketches he made in nature. He frequently repeated the same scene on different sized canvases, or as an etching or lithograph.
"I am what you would term, a realistic painter. I have learned much from many of the great paintings of the past. All forms and colors have already been used. It is the personal element you put into a picture is what makes the work original." John Fulton Folinsbee
Oil Painting of Lehigh Barge by John Fulton Folinsbee, 1925
Though Folinsbee was known for his landscapes, he had a love for old buildings and often depicted local factories and tenement buildings.
Although he started as an impressionist artist, after 1925 his paintings began to reflect an Expressionist style, rich in color and emotion.
Folinsbee always had a sketchbook or a box of 8 x 10 inch canvas boards with him, ready to capture any scene that caught his eye. He was famous for spending afternoons sketching on the bridge at New Hope and for tossing anything that displeased him into the Delaware River.
Robert Spencer (1879-1931)
From 1906 through 1910, Spencer lived in towns in close proximity to the Delaware River, such as Frenchtown, New Jersey and Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania.
Spencer spent the summer of 1909 studying with Daniel Garber at his home in Lumberville. Soon after, Spencer moved to New Hope, where he roomed with fellow artist Charles Ramsey. The two impoverished artists rented the dilapidated old Huffnagle Mansion for two dollars a month.
"It is the human side that interests me... a landscape without a building or a figure is a very lonely picture to me. I love the cities, the towns, the crowds... It is a curious contradiction that I live in the country." Robert Spencer
On the Canal, New Hope by Robert Spencer, 1916
Spencer married Margaret Fulton in 1914. They moved across the river to Lambertville, where they lived above the firehouse. In 1916, they bought a home in Rabbit Run, midway between New Hope and Phillips Mill.
"I don't care whether the building is a factory or a mill; whether it makes automobile tires or silk shirts. It is the romantic mass of the building, its placing relative to the landscape and the life in and about it that count." Robert Spencer
Mary Elizabeth Price (1877-1965)
Mary Elizabeth Prince was born in West Virginia but grew up in Solebury Township, near New Hope.
Later, Price studied art in Philadelphia, living there over a decade. She moved back to New Hope in Bucks County in late the 1920s. She lived with her brother in "Pumpkin Seed," an old yellow stone cottage, she named for its size and color.
"When I first saw the original cottage it was painted such a vivid yellow that I instinctively thought of a pumpkin; and it was so small that I named it Pumpkin Seed more in derision than anything else. But the quaintness of the name grew on us so that we've learned to love it." Mary Elizabeth Price
Price grew a garden of irises, mallows, peonies, lilies, delphiniums, poppies, hollyhocks, and gladioli that she used as subjects for her paintings.
An early member of the Philadelphia Ten, Price organized several of the group's exhibitions. She steadily exhibited her works with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and other organizations over the course of her career.
Price often gave lectures to the New Hope Women's Club, where she showed her paintings and encouraged local artists.
Fern Coppedge (1883-1951)
Coppedge first visited the New Hope area in 1917 and settled in nearby Lumberville, Pennsylvania, in 1920. She joined “The Philadelphia Ten” in 1922 and exhibited regularly with them through 1935.
During the 1920's, Coppedge held frequent exhibitions at her studio and home on North Main Street in Lumberville, known as “Boxwood.”
"I may erase most of my sketch, but after I have it the way I want it in charcoal, then I work over the entire canvas with a large brush. I use thin paint in trying to get the right value. I test different spots to see whether the scene should be painted rich or pale. Then I proceed with the actual painting using paint right from the tube. I hold the brush at arm’s length and paint from the spine. That gives relaxation…” Fern Coppedge
It was around this time that she stopped exhibiting with The Philadelphia Ten and instead focused on exhibiting at her studio, Phillips’ Mill, and other venues.
It was said by a local art critic for The New Hope magazine in November 1933: “We remember seeing Mrs. Coppedge trudging through the deep snow wrapped in a bearskin coat, her sketching materials slung over her shoulder, her blue eyes sparkling with the joy of life”.
Oil Painting of Lumberville in Winter by Fern Coppedge
During the first two decades of the 20th century the Pennsylvania Impressionists of the New Hope Artist Colony dominated American Landscape Painting.
Aerial Photograph of the New Hope Colony at Phillips Mill, Glass negative, Library Company of Philadelphia, 1926.