Opening Reception: Friday, January 17
from 5 pm to 8 pm
Exhibition January 16 to April 6
The first exhibition of 2025 will be “John Costigan, American Idyll” which will feature an opening reception on Friday, January 17. (Please note that the exhibit opens on January 16, but we will have the reception on Friday from 5-8 pm with sweets and savories from the Alliance).
Celebrating the idyllic and challenging aspects of rural life in America, Costigan's family and farm are muses for the works in this exhibition featuring 20 works from the permanent collection of the Swope Art Museum.
John Costigan was a self-taught painter and trained printer distinguished by his impressionistic style and affinity for bucolic scenes. Born on February 29, 1888, in Providence, Rhode Island, he was orphaned in adolescence.
Costigan’s formal art instruction was limited to a few weeks at the Art Student’s League where he studied under William Merritt Chase and George Bridgman. He stayed committed instead to a studio on 14th Street called the Kit Kat Club, where illustrators and newspaper artists spent nights sketching from live models in an informal atmosphere.
Costigan married sculptor and professional artist’s model Ida Blessin in 1919, and the couple retreated to Orangeburg, New York. A twenty-five-mile distance from New York City, Orangeburg was situated by the Hudson River. The same area had served as a destination for Costigan’s weekend sketch trips in previous years.
Costigan’s body of work across the mediums of oil, watercolor, etching, and lithography provides an extensive exploration of the pastoral, yet also documents the realities of the artist’s rural life. Family members served as models for his scenes, with wife Ida a primary model for the solitary women and motherly figures. His five children, too, and later grandchildren, were influential in providing a basis for many compositions. Despite these ties to specifications of time and biographical experience, Costigan’s scenes are also outside of time, in the peaceful world of the pastoral.