GLOUCESTER, MASS.- Exploring 40 years of the artistic collaboration between Rockport father and son, Tom and T.M. Nicholas, is the focus of the Cape Ann Museum’s exhibition, “Tom and T. M. Nicholas: A Father and Son’s Journey in Paint.” The Nicholas works, created in the well-known style of the Cape Ann School of Painting and curated from numerous private collections, is on view beginning Jan. 11, 2020 through April 12, 2020.

Born and raised in Connecticut, Tom Nicholas studied with Ernst Lohrmann, H. Fisk, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has lived and worked in Rockport since the early 1960s, running a gallery on Main Street with his wife, Gloria. His work in oil, watercolor, and gouache has received numerous awards and recognitions from the Allied Artists of America, the Salmagundi Club, the American Watercolor Society, and the National Academy of Design. He was elected an Academician of the National Academy of Design and a Dolphin Fellow of the American Watercolor Society.

T.M. Nicholas, a student of the Montserrat College of Art, studied with his father as well as with the respected Rockport painter John Terelak. Working out of a studio in Essex, Mass., T.M., like his father, exhibits widely, has paintings in museum collections, and has won many awards.

As part of the exhibition’s related programming, T.M. Nicholas and art historian Judith Curtis will give separate gallery talks. Curtis is a freelance writer specializing in art-related themes and is a past curator of the Rockport Art Association and Museum’s Permanent Collection. She lives on Cape Ann and is a regular contributor to the American Art Review. She has also written several books including Anthony Thieme, The Life and Art of Paul Strisik, N.A., W. Lester Stevens, N.A., (1888-1969), Harry A. Vincent and His Contemporaries, Rocky Neck Art Colony (1850—1950), A. T. Hibbard, American Master, and two Charles Movalli exhibition catalogues. More recently, she curated - and wrote the catalogue for - Polly Thayer Starr and the Alchemy of Painting. She was also co-curator of the Strokes of Genius: Women Artists of New England, for which she also wrote the catalogue.

Cape Ann has long been recognized as one of this country’s oldest and most important art colonies and the Cape Ann Museum’s collections contain examples of works by many of the artists who came to this region, including Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, Cecilia Beaux, Nell Blaine, Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, John Sloan and Anna Hyatt Huntington. At the heart of the Museum’s holdings is the single largest collection of works by early 19th century artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865). A native of Gloucester, Lane was a lithographer and a painter and his works displayed at the Cape Ann Museum capture the town’s busy seaport in its heyday.

The Cape Ann Museum is dedicated to illuminating the diversity of life on Cape Ann by collecting, preserving and presenting the interconnected stories of art and industry during the past 400 years. Building on the popular and critical success of the 2019 Homer at the Beach exhibition, 2020 marks an exciting year for the Museum with the opening a new campus in June 2020 at the gateway to Gloucester. This new campus, along with other Museum initiatives is aimed at building greater audiences and awareness of the institution regionally, nationally and internationally in anticipation of the Museum’s 150th anniversary in 2023.