Certifiable Guide to Tweaking the Beauport (Gloucester) Easel

Certifiable Guide to Tweaking the Beauport (Gloucester) Easel

by Dave Gehman, dgehman@ I've purchased my last easel That, of course, is a joke. Those who paint never could possibly purchase their last easel until (as Stapleton Kearns says) the death bunny comes hop-hop-hoppin' along. Anyway, my most recent easel is a Gloucester-type, made in China and sold by Jerry's Artarama (and ASW Express). Prior to early 2014, I'd only seen pictures of this design, primarily in Stapleton Kearns's blog, . Then in January, I saw the design in person at Stape's Snowcamp workshop in New Hampshire. At that point, I knew I wanted it. I played with building my own, but concluded that I had too few tools, too little skill, and too few hours to build my own. History: The Anderson/Gloucester easel Sometime in the 1910s, a Swedish immigrant named Oscar Anderson began making Anderson easels. They became popular with outdoor painters in the Cape Ann, Massachusetts area, and were sold from Anderson's studio in Gloucester. Eventually Oscar's easel became known as the Gloucester easel. (Today, these painters might have said that they were painting `en plein air,' but in this early age, people in Cape Ann spoke English. As a result, they just painted outdoors.) In the 19th and 20th Century, art colonies were active on Cape Ann: Gloucester, Rockport, and Annisquam, with some spillover to nearby Manchester-by-the-Sea and Essex. The Gloucester Easel was especially popular in the Cape Ann area. It had some penetration into other areas of the US, including the mountainous regions of New Hampshire and Vermont, where Cape Ann painters like Aldro Hibbard, Emile Gruppe, and John Carlson took their Gloucester easels to paint during the winter.

Figure 1 - The Beauport version of the Gloucester easel, photographed in one of its natural habitats, 32 inches of New England snow. (The other habitat? Planted firmly on granite shores north of Boston.)

Figure 2 - Charles Hawthorne demonstrating to a class in Provincetown, 1910. He's using a Gloucester easel, but one configured without support bars. Photo from Wikimedia.

Figure 3 - Kenneth Nunamaker (1890-1957), date unknown (possibly 1920s-30s judging by the cap, his age and those striped socks), He's using what is essentially a Gloucester easel, now with support bars, but with a different arrangement at the top. Photo from Michener Art Museum.

Many of the pre-eminent Cape Ann artists ran schools during the summer, selling many Gloucester easels to their students. No idea whether this was hundreds or thousands of easels over 30 or more years.

Figure 4 - Photo of students in Aldro Hibbard's Rockport-based School of Art. Everyone appears to be using a Gloucester easel. The clothing and wooden lobster traps suggest a 1950s time frame. From Artist in Two Worlds, by Aldo Hibbard and John Cooley, Rumford Press, 1968 The easel clearly made it to Pennsylvania:

Figure 5 - Edward W. Redfield at work outdoors, 1930 (photographed by Peter A. Juley & Son; collection in the Smithsonian). The basic pyramid is all Gloucester, but the stick-and-arm canvas holder is very different.

You can see more pictures of an original Anderson easel on . It's a mid-stage design, still built by Anderson, and it used to belong to Thomas Curtin, an accomplished Vermont painter.

For real plein air painters When you first meet it, the Gloucester easel is just a bundle of sticks. This bundle can be arranged into a 3-sided pyramid whose base is nearly as wide as its legs are tall. This makes it eminently usable (read: stable, not blown over) in the Cape Ann area, which often experiences high winds.

Because each of the legs is adjustable, you can set the Gloucester easel up on nearly impossible sites, including sea walls built from huge blocks of granite, wildly hilly countryside, or 24 inches of snowpack during a blizzard. The first two these physical features are found all over Cape Ann. The third is found in the colony's Vermont and New Hampshire winter haunts.

Its size and features make it really good for (a) Tall painters. You can use it to paint at eye level even if you're in the NBA.* (b) Real plein air painters (see previous 2 paragraphs; it sets up in all sorts of wild sites) (c) Continuing your athletic development (lots of stretching and lifting in carrying and setup) (d) Painting a very wide range of sizes, literally 4 x 5 inches to 4 x 5 feet or more. (e) Fast setup (55 seconds to set up with the tweaks in this document; 1 minute 15 seconds to tear down and stow)

*Most of the Gloucester and Rockport artists were 6 feet tall and over.

Good for connecting with history If you like using tools and techniques from the painters of yore, you'll like the Gloucester, thanks to its long history of use by master painters on the East Coast.

Wood & brass Finally, if you like the aesthetics of late 19th ? early 20th C equipment for enthusiasts, you'll like the hardwood and brass of the Gloucester. As looks go, it's a cousin to those magnificent old view cameras, with their gleaming gold-toned metal and lacquered maple.

Two vendors today There are two sources for the Gloucester easel right now: The first is from Tobin Nadeau. His hand-crafted, Vermont maple and brass version is the Take-it-Easel.

The Take-It-Easel is ready to set up the moment you buy it

The second is the semi-mass-produced, Chinese elm or beech Beauport Easel sold by Jerry's Artarama and ASW Express. or

The Beauport takes tweaking.

To be perfectly accurate, you can use it right out of the box if you want, but the Beauport takes tweaking if you want to be happy with it for years to come.

Advice nearly everywhere: buy the Take-It-Easel Most sources will tell you to buy the Take-it-Easel. It costs three to four times as much as the Beauport. Apparently it's worth it: many who began with a Beauport have set them aside and purchased a Take-itEasel, including Dan Corey, who outlined the most important fix to the Beauport (see Tweak 1 below). However, if cost is an issue, the Beauport is an attractive alternative. Since I had used 98% of my supply of disposable income at Stape's workshop, I had to opt for low cost. The Beauport's quality--at least the once I received from Jerry's--is good. The wood is good, the machining is good, and overall the hardware is at least okay. Nomenclature First, some nomenclature:

Figure 6 - Parts of the Beauport. The C-wire is shown here with its spine up; in a moment, you'll see that they have to be spine down. Holes running from hallway up the left and right legs are for canvas pegs (not shown--what is shown is the accessory panel holder that clamps onto the legs). Three holes visible at the bottom of each leg are for leg extensions (3 come with the Beauport).

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download