Provincetown Artist Registry, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, New England

PROVINCETOWN ARTIST REGISTRY

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Ross Moffett

(1888-1971)

Ross Moffett

Ross Embrose Moffett (1888-1971), “Untitled” (West End, Red Inn, 1931
Verso: Witches Cauldron, 1947), Watercolor, 12” x 18” - Private Collection

Ross Moffett

Ross Embrose Moffett (1888-1971), “Life on the Dunes”, n.d., Oil on Canvas, 18” x 24” - Private Collection

At the time Charles W. Hawthorne had begun to surround himself with a glory still lingering in Provincetown today, Ross Moffett moved into this circle of light with primary attributes which were to recieve stimulation and refinement from Hawthorne. Moffett viewed Hawthorne's teaching from his own strongly individual vantage point, althought he accepted it with natural respect.

The turning point for Moffett came in 1916, when he began to feel that he was discovering his own voice.

"I continued working, endeavoring to mine the vein I had uncovered. My subject was life in Provincetown as observed it visually during my many walks in the town, particularly in the west section where the Portuguese flavor was especially manifest."

Extemporizing his statement about life through the virtuoso handling of the figure in the landscape, Moffett potrayed a world of bleak strength, fateful mood and stark poetry. The sheer painting power of the forms and color Moffett used in these paintings seems to have been his most forceful statement about man and his fate.

It is, moreover, expressed as only a painter can express it without loss to rhetoric. Few American painters so successfully incorporated the figure in a landscape as Ross Moffett.

By Josephine del Deo