James Fitzgerald’s powerful watercolor paintings of the American coast and the environs of California and New England, his various sojourns, confirm a commitment to the legacy of American painting that harks back to 19th-century realist landscapes. With the firmly rooted traditions of American art in his grasp, Fitzgerald brings to that history of American art in his grasp, Fitzgerald brings to that history a strength of 20th-century conviction that sustains a medium once relegated to a less serious focus, watercolor. At the hands of the modernist, Fitzgerald’s art transformed watercolor into a substance both enduring and profound. Painting the world around him—whether a humble team of plow animals or a scene of nature unleashed on rock and sea—Fitzgerald brought light, paint, and inspiration together to evoke his personal encounter with his subjects, linking viewer and motif to his experience with nature. Countering the traditional preference for oil painting, he made of his watercolors a strikingly permanent visual record. The work is as enduring as the stones of the sea he portrays. No neophyte to the art world, Boston-born Fitzgerald studied from 1919-1923 at the Massachusetts College of Art with American masters, Cyrus Dallin, Wilbur Hamilton, and Ernest Major and subsequently at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His career took him in the 1920’s to Monterey, California, with the Cannery Row artists’ and writers’ circle, working on projects for the public works programs in the 1930s. There he developed a testy camaraderie with John Steinbeck and Edward “Doc” Ricketts along with the intellectual community that they engendered. It wasn’t until Fitzgerald became a regular summer resident on Monhegan Island, Maine, in 1938 that his art began to evolve. The immersion of the artist into the spirit of the harsh island declared itself in the transformation of his art from academic realism into virile expressionism. Fitzgerald approached the subject of the surf, sea, and rocks with a vigor reminiscent of the powerful paintings of Winslow Homer, imbuing his work also with the calligraphic strokes of Oriental art informed by his interest in Eastern philosophy. Fitzgerald eventually purchased the studio of Rockwell Kent, one of the early artist settlers of the island, deriving spiritual solace and metaphysical inspiration from the seafaring community. The island’s artist-colony atmosphere in the summer encouraged Fitzgerald to explore a relationship with the life of the sea, but he did not engage in the seafaring activities upon which the local lobstermen and fishermen depended for their livelihood. Fitzgerald was a voyeur of that life and yet a dependent on the arduous experience, which informed his art and inspired his approach to it. During his more than thirty-year encounter with Monhegan Island, Fitzgerald continually read and studied Oriental philosophies, which became sustenance for his art. A friendship developed in 1958 with Anne Hubert, his champion and confidant who, along with her husband, Ed, assisted Fitzgerald in his financial struggle to acquire Kent’s cottage when the studio became less suitable for a home in his later years. The dedication of the two devoted friends to assist the artist in his times of greatest need proves a model of devotion to a belief in the artist’s right to pursue his art unencumbered by financial constraints. The Huberts’ collection of Fitzgerald’s paintings provides a context from which to view the late artist. Selecting works that typify the various moods and sites which moved him, the Huberts maintained a record of artistic achievement that defines both a person and personal vision. The paintings in the exhibition have been selected to represent a small segment of each of several topics that sustained Fitzgerald’s interest throughout his life, including portraits of his former wife, Pegs, and views of the magnificent sea off the Maine Coast.   Valerie Livingston   Oxen. James Fitzgerald. Watercolor on paper. 22.5 x 29.25" In the collection of Anne Hubert.