Selectmen of Provincetown

Charles Webster Hawthorne was a truly dynamic painter, his work balancing a guiding naturalism with aesthetic appeal. As Hawthorne stated in his 1938 guide Hawthorne on Painting, he strove to paint “something that makes [people] believe in the beauty and glory of human existence” (as quoted in Richard Mühlberger, Charles Webster Hawthorne: Paintings & Watercolors, New York, 1999, p. 91). When not painting, Hawthorne ran the Cape Cod School of Art, a summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts which quickly grew into a leading artist colony for plein-air impressionism.