Wendell Macy

1845 - 1913

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts Wendell F. Macy was a descendant of two of Nantucket’s earliest settlers. When he was in his twenties, Macy worked for a company that dealt in nautical instruments, but he eventually turned his attention to working as an artist and opened a second-floor art studio on Main Street in Nantucket. Macy tended to work in pastels for portraiture work and in oil on board for his maritime subjects.

Within a few years Macy was summering in Nantucket, painting local scenes on wood panels that he sold to tourists from his gallery on Main Street. He is best known for his paintings of coastal landscapes, ships, and the shipwrecks common to Nantucket’s South Shore. At least one of Macy’s paintings was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.

Macy was very involved in the Nantucket community, serving at various times as President and Vice President of the Nantucket Atheneum, Secretary of the Nantucket Agricultural Society, Chairman and Secretary of the Nantucket Republican Caucus and as a Councilman of the Nantucket Historical Association. Macy’s paintings have been exhibited at the Smithsonian's Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. and are in the collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the Nantucket Historical Association.

Tragically, Macy became despondent as a result of the death of his wife and was to be committed to the State Lunatic Hospital in Taunton, Massachusetts when he took his own life in his New Bedford home by inhaling natural gas.

The painting in this collection is a complete anomaly and may be the only Western subject painted by Macy. Based on contemporary newspaper accounts, Macy almost certainly never traveled out west, much less to Camp Apache, which at the time was located in a remote part of the Arizona Territory. The most probable explanation for this painting is that it was commissioned by a client from New Bedford or Nantucket and was based on a sketch or perhaps a photograph in the client’s possession.

CAMP APACHE Oil on Canvas 1880 11 7⁄8 x 19 1⁄8 inches