Island People Portraits and Stories from Nantucket
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The NHA’s collections contain hundreds of painted portraits and thousands of studio photographs representing people from the island’s past. When you think of painted portraits of Nantucketers, does your mind’s eye imagine stiffly seated sea captains, dressed in sober suits with spyglasses in their hands and little ships sailing across the background? Or men of business in equally sober suits paired with their fashionably dressed wives—canvases seemingly plucked from a large formal parlor? The NHA’s collections certainly contain such images. The museum holds more than one hundred painted portraits of sea captains alone, so many that a visitor to the Whaling Museum in the 1950s complained that they all looked alike, and maybe the curators should put a few back into storage. Well, as regular readers of Historic Nantucket will know, Nantucket history is much more than white whaling captains and wealthy merchant families. It is much more than even just whaling, in fact. The images on these pages represent a selection from the more than one hundred islander likenesses that will be featured this spring in the new exhibition Island People: Portraits and Stories from Nantucket, opening April 22 in the Williams Forsyth Gallery at the Whaling Museum. The exhibition will draw from the NHA’s collections of painted, photographic, and silhouette portraits to highlight both famous and lesser known Nantucketers whose life stories intersect with the themes and currents of the island’s history. 6 Historic Nantucket | Spring 2022
