The Jasper Rand Art Museum
The Jasper Rand Art Museum was dedicated at the 1927 reopening of the Westfield Athenaeum. The gallery continues to exhibit local and regional artists and Westfield history exhibitions. Check below for more information on the current exhibit.
If you are a professional artist and would like to exhibit your work in the Jasper Rand Art Gallery please contact Executive Director Guy McLain at 413-568-7833 extension 101 or gmclain@westath.org.
Current Exhibit
Ashcan Art: the Paintings of Three Early Twentieth Century Westfield Artists
This exhibit features the works of Muriel Richie, Edith Chadwick, and Bertha Bates, who were active Westfield artists from the 1920s through the 1950s.
The Ashcan School was an artistic movement originating in New York in the early twentieth century. The artists of this movement thought that the art of the nineteenth century was too centered on idealized subjects, and failed to show the life of the common people. Through the use of a loose brushstroke style, these artists painted scenes of laborers, urban street scenes, and city slums. Critics at the time talked about how these artists were always showing the ashcans in a particular scene, rather than emphasizing the beautiful. What began as a criticism was soon embraced with pride by these artists, and the Ashcan label was soon associated with these artists.
Soon, a number of artists outside New York, adopted many of the characteristics of the Ashcan Style. Muriel Richie, who grew up on the North Shore, and studied with Emile Gruppe in Gloucester, adopted many of the Ashcan painter’s ideas through her contact with the active art community centered in Gloucester. Even after moving to Westfield, she continued to return to the North Shore every summer. Her paintings of workers on boat docks were especially influenced by the Ashcan artists. But she also loved to paint rural New England landscapes.
Edith Chadwick studied at the Boston Art Museum School, and after arriving in Westfield, taught art to the children of the Tuberculosis Sanatorium where her husband, Dr. Henry Chadwick, was director. She developed a very interesting style, combining characteristics of the Ashcan style with influences from American Impressionism. She also maintained some connections to the artists of the North Shore.
Bertha Bates, a lifelong resident of Westfield, began painting at age 10, and later studied with Annie Archer, a New York art critic and teacher, and with the acclaimed J.J. LaValley, who lived in Westfield for a time. And although based in Westfield, she too spent time on the North Shore, and actually had an exhibit in Gloucester in the 1930s.
All three of these artists were featured in several shows in the Rand Art Gallery, here at the Athenaeum in the 1930s and 1940s. And although only a relatively few of their paintings have survived in the Athenaeum’s collection, it is a great pleasure to bring their surviving paintings back to the Rand Art Gallery in order to celebrate their contribution to art in Westfield.