Painting the Town: A History of Art in Saugatuck and Douglas

Beginning in the 1890s, hundreds of city artists, mostly from Chicago, flocked to the Saugatuck-Douglas area for its unspoiled lakes, forests, dunes, and picturesque villages. The great industrial boom in large cities like Chicago and Detroit led to a shocking increase in wealth and mechanization but also brought overcrowding, noise, and dirt. These urban artists sought escape from the complexities of city life and came to believe that the wholesomeness of the natural landscape and "the life of the plain people" represented the genuine America. By 1930, so many city artists arrived every summer that several art schools were organized in Saugatuck, including the Ox-Bow Summer School of Painting, established by painters from the Art Institute of Chicago. Several artists from the summer schools earned national and regional recognition, including Claes Oldenburg, LeRoy Neiman, Francis Chapin, Carl Hoerman, Alfred Krehbiel, John Norton, and William Greason. Illustrated with black-and-white and color reproductions of paintings of Saugatuck-Douglas and its surrounding landscape, "Painting the Town" also includes biographies of 90 artists known to have worked in the area since 1890. This book also explores the role of the artist as historian, since the paintings and sketches included have helped Saugatuck to define and memorialize its landscape and its past.