The Painters Who Made This Island Famous

In the middle of the eighteen hundreds, most Americans had never heard of Mount Desert Island. It was a remote fishing and farming outpost at the edge of the map. What changed that was paint.

In the mid eighteen forties, Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, visited the island and captured its dramatic mountains meeting the sea. His brilliant pupil, Frederic Edwin Church, arrived in eighteen fifty and returned again and again, turning the fog, the surf, and the granite cliffs into luminous canvases that hung in galleries in New York and beyond. The marine painter Fitz Henry Lane painted the island too.

These works were widely exhibited and reproduced, and they did something powerful. They made this wild place fashionable. Well to do city dwellers, curious to see the scenery for themselves, began arriving as tourists.

At first they boarded in the homes of local farmers and fishermen. They were called rusticators, people playing at the simple rustic life. Within a few decades this quiet island had become one of the most sought after summer destinations in the country.

It was art, more than anything, that first put Bar Harbor on the map.