Lincoln Glenn is drawing attention to Jane Peterson through a gallery presentation that situates the artist within the broader Gloucester and Cape Ann story. On its website, the New York gallery identifies Peterson as an American artist born Jennie Christine in Elgin, Illinois, who changed her name in 1909 after her first success. The gallery’s materials link her career to a strand of American painting shaped by Massachusetts coastlines, plein-air practice, and the expressive handling of color that helped define the Cape Ann School.
The gallery’s online text presents Peterson as a painter whose work ranged from landscapes to still lifes and blended Impressionist and Expressionist movements. It notes that she studied in Europe and the United States, exhibited extensively, and became especially known for floral subjects inspired by gardens in Massachusetts. Lincoln Glenn also says her paintings are in major collections including the Whitney Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Peterson’s biography on Lincoln Glenn adds further context to the artist’s career and travels. After enrolling at Pratt Institute in New York at age 18 with a gift from her mother, she studied with Arthur Wesley Dow and graduated in 1901. She also studied at the Art Students League with Frank DuMond, later worked in Boston and Maryland, and spent time in Paris, Venice, London and Madrid. The gallery says she lived around the corner from Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris and attended their gatherings, where she met figures including Picasso and Matisse. It also states that she joined Louis Comfort Tiffany on a continental painting expedition in his private railway car.
Lincoln Glenn’s Cape Ann materials place Peterson among the leading figures associated with Gloucester and Cape Ann, alongside Hayley Lever, Anthony Thieme, William Lester Stevens and Frederick Mulhaupt. The gallery describes Gloucester and Cape Ann as havens for artists for more than a century, with harbors, sailing vessels and shifting atmosphere serving as recurring subjects. At the turn of the 20th century, painters there embraced plein-air ideals tied to American Impressionism while developing more expressive approaches to color, composition and brushwork.
That coastal context also extends to other artists in Lincoln Glenn’s roster. The gallery notes that Peterson painted many beach and pier scenes from trips to artist colonies along the Massachusetts coast, and that her floral subjects were inspired by the gardens of her summer house in Ipswich, Massachusetts. It similarly presents Hayley Lever as a plein-air painter who discovered the scenic potential of Gloucester, Rockport and Marblehead after moving to New York in 1912, and Anthony Thieme as an artist who moved to Cape Ann in Rockport in the late 1920s and made atmosphere and light central to his work.
The gallery’s Cape Ann overview also connects the region to Milton Avery and Sally Michel Avery, both of whom are featured in Lincoln Glenn’s materials. The text says Milton Avery first visited Gloucester in 1920 and returned nearly every summer through 1945, while Sally Michel Avery spent the summer of 1924 painting in East Gloucester, where she met Milton Avery in the next studio. Lincoln Glenn further notes that modernist painter Arthur B. Carles summered in Gloucester with his daughter, Mercedes Matter, and spent time with Hans Hofmann, reinforcing the area’s reputation as an enduring art colony.
Lincoln Glenn, founded in 2022, says it presents American art from the 19th century through the late 20th century and has galleries in Chelsea and on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Its website lists current and upcoming exhibitions including 'Making Space: American Women Artists and the Century of Change' and 'Sherron Francis: Beyond the Stain', while the Cape Ann page also points to the gallery’s continuing focus on coastal American painting and the artists associated with Gloucester.
