Cornish Art Colony in the context of "Art Students League of New York"

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⭐ Core Definition: Cornish Art Colony

The Cornish Art Colony (or Cornish Artists’ Colony, or Cornish Colony) was a popular art colony centered in Cornish, New Hampshire, from about 1895 through the years of World War I. Attracted by the natural beauty of the area, about 100 artists, sculptors, writers, designers, and politicians lived there either full-time or during the summer months. With views across the Connecticut River Valley to Mount Ascutney in Vermont, the bucolic scenery was considered to resemble that of an Italian landscape.

The central figure of the Cornish Colony was Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Beginning around 1885, Augustus attracted a summer colony of artists that grew into a single extended social network. Some were related, some were friends, some were promising students from the Art Students League of New York that Saint-Gaudens had co-founded, and some were Saint-Gaudens' assistants who developed significant careers of their own.

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Cornish Art Colony in the context of Paul Manship

Paul Howard Manship (December 25, 1885 – January 31, 1966) was an American sculptor. He consistently created mythological pieces in a classical style, and was a major force in the Art Deco movement. He is well known for his large public commissions, including the iconic Prometheus in Rockefeller Center and the Celestial Sphere Woodrow Wilson Memorial in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also credited for designing the modern rendition of New York City's official seal.

Manship gained notice early in his career for rejecting the Beaux-Arts architecture movement and preferring linear compositions with a flowing simplicity. Additionally, he shared a summer home in Plainfield, New Hampshire, part of the Cornish Art Colony, with William Zorach for a number of years. Other members of the highly social colony were also contemporary artists. Manship created his own artist retreat on Cape Ann, developing a 15-acre site on two former granite quarries in Lanesville, a village of Gloucester, MA. A local nonprofit, the Manship Artists Residency was established in 2015 to preserve this estate as an artist residency program.

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