By the late 1920s, when she created Mr. and Mrs. Clough, Gertrude H. Fiske was at the close of the prime of her painting career. The Cloughs, whose kind expressions and quintessential elderliness made them perfect examples of the loneliness of aging, were depicted by her either together, singly, or with another model in more than five paintings, all executed between 1925 and 1930. Of these, Sunday Afternoon (c. 1925, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia) is the most closely related in mood and pose to the Addison's work. When it was awarded the Thomas B. Clarke Prize by the National Academy in 1925, at the l00th Annual Exhibition, a critic noted that “Sunday Afternoon celebrates the current interest in old things and plain things, cottage interiors and ideal tables, hooked rugs and Rogers groups.... the character in the faces is honest wrinkled decency and industry, the whole picture of age seen from without as tamed birds within a cage are seen.”¹ Clearly, the country's new taste for what is now described as the Colonial Revival became a basis of interpretation for Fiske's choice of subject. Another critic, writing of Sunday Afternoon, commented: "Gertrude Fiske... paints once again, presumably from memory, the old man who has sat for her so often; also a really delightful old lady with folded hands. These are obviously models placed in retrospective positions and just painted.”²

Ironically, though, Fiske was not painting from memory but from live models in her community. By the year that Mr. and Mrs. Clough was completed and exhibited, the sitters, who were obviously well known to critics and viewers alike, had for the first time assumed an identity, which was rare in Fiske's practice. The painting personified aging, but the two people depicted were real and had names. Milford C. Clough, born in Mount Vernon, Maine, was a retired meat merchant. Around 1916 he purchased with his wife, Ida J. (Bemis) Clough, three acres of land in Weston, Massachusetts, and by 1927 they had moved there from neighboring Waltham to a house on Merriam Street. It is not known how Fiske made the acquaintance of the couple, who in their retirement were available for posing at her home and barn studio in Weston. By 1930 the Cloughs had moved back to Waltham where Milford died eight years later from cancer of the liver, and where Ida continued to live until her death in 1953.³

Gertrude Fiske was born in Boston on 16 April 1879,⁴ and began her formal art education in 1904 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with Boston School painters Edmund C. Tarbell, Philip L. Hale, and Frank W. Benson as teachers. She went on to study and work with marine artist Charles H. Woodbury, who had established an active summer painting colony in Ogunquit, Maine, where Fiske had a summer house. Woodbury's seasonal art school at Perkin's Cove became a magnet for many amateur and professional artists who escaped Boston's summer heat for the cool sea breezes and coastal views of southern Maine.

Fiske's early works, from 1904 to 1919, show the inspiration of the Boston School figurative tradition, with its emphasis on interiors and a tight brushstroke. Her shift to a freer painterly style coincided with her associations with Woodbury in Ogunquit. This style became her signature, mature method and was applied to landscapes, sketches, figurative studies of women, and portraiture (including many formal commissions). Contemporary critics noted her maverick choices of subject:

Miss Fiske is not so concerned with the strict portrait commission as she is in moving in broader channels, using the figure subjects, the models, for special purposes which are concerned with arrangement, special lighting and color harmony. A considerable number of canvases has been produced introducing, among others, elderly men with flowing beards and straight shouldered women with silvered hair.⁵

Fiske's art received critical acclaim and awards both locally and nationally, and she maintained an active exhibition schedule through the 1930s. During this time she was elected a member of the National Academy of Design, and she was the first woman to be nominated to the Massachusetts State Art Commission. Although a tremendous body of work survives her, Fiske's reputation waned after the mid-1930s with the decline in demand and appreciation for the Boston School painters and the onset of the Depression.

Carol Walker Aten, Addison Gallery of American Art: 65 Years, A Selective Catalogue (Andover, Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1996), pp. 370-71


1. "The Clarke Prize-Winner,” unidentified newspaper clipping, 1925, Gertrude Fiske Personal Scrapbooks, Estate of the Artist.

2. H. P., "Triumph of Craftsmanship: unidentified newspaper clipping, n.d. [c. 1925], Fiske Scrapbooks.

3. Information from Waltham, Massachusetts, town directories, 1939-55.

4. Fiske's year of birth has often been thought to be 1878, but recent research into the artist's correspondence and records confirms the year 1879.

5. “‘Grandmother’ and Others; Figure Subjects, New England Types, In Doors and Out, by Miss Fiske—Watercolors by Warren,” unidentified newspaper clipping, 4 April 1928, Fiske Scrapbooks.