Identity Crisis Stonington gallery seeks names of painter Carl Cutler’s local subjects

Their eyes stare from the old canvases, some faded by time, others newly restored. They wear pretty pink dresses or flowing skirts, and some wear nothing at all. The blondes have cropped, curly hair – flapper style – while a redhead’s long locks dangle down her bare back as she reclines on a sofa. An angry-looking model sports a black bob as she clutches the beads around her neck and glances sideways.

The women of Carl Cutler’s oil paintings certainly aren’t faceless, just nameless – for now, anyway. That’s the mystery behind the current exhibition of 40 Cutler canvases at the Eagull Gallery in Stonington, which runs through Sept. 6.

“These were local young women who sat for Cutler and were models,” said Michael Connors, who runs the seasonal gallery with his partner, Trudy Rosato. “We were only able to identify one of them, Cuppy Cutler, the woman sewing.”

Dorothy “Cuppy” Cutler was Carl’s wife, but the other young women who modeled for the painter at his summer studio in Brooksville could be anyone’s grandmother or great-aunt, sister or mother.

“We didn’t know what to name these paintings because we didn’t know who these women were,” Connors said. “These women all had names. They were somebody, but we don’t have any idea who. We want to find out more.”

What they do know is that

Cutler was a listed artist known for his watercolors of the Maine coast, where the Bostonian spent his summers. Born in 1873, he began studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1896, where he learned to paint formal and elegant oil portraits in the style of the day. He wrote a book called “Modern Color,” which describes his theory of re-creating natural colors. He later broke from tradition and formed the Boston Five, a group that championed modernist art.

“He was very successful with his watercolors, but with the oils, he didn’t show them,” Connors said. Other than a painting that was shown in the Boston Art Club exhibition, “there was no mention of them.”

Rosato, who is Connors’ partner in the Manhattan-based Connors-Rosato Gallery, knew of Cutler’s work. Her gallery deals in 19th and 20th century European and American art, and she formerly directed the 20th century art department at William Doyle Galleries in New York. So when Connors called her from Maine to tell her about the paintings, she hopped the next flight to Bangor.

“It was really exciting,” she said by phone from her New York gallery. “Most had never been seen at all, and they had never been seen together.”

The paintings had been in storage in a barn in Brooksville since Cutler’s death in 1945. Last summer, a friend of Connors’ came into the gallery and told him he should check out some paintings at the cottage of her neighbor, Cutler’s daughter-in-law Betty.

“I got up there and started pulling paintings down and there were 40 paintings, wrapped in brown paper and cardboard,” said Connors, who is an expert in West Indian furniture and a former antiques buyer for Lord & Taylor in New York. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I really couldn’t. I’ve been all over the world and had many opportunities to buy, but nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

The paintings are in various stages of completion. Some are signed, others are not. The range of styles is equally broad. Some of the paintings have distinct Fauvist influences, echoing Cezanne’s striking color combinations, while others are done in the pointilist tradition made famous by Georges Seurat.

“He was trying out different styles,” Connors said. “Maybe these pieces were works in progress, but as a whole, they’re a continuum.”

Betty Cutler, who married the painter’s son Charles, knew that the paintings were done in the 1920s and ’30s, but she had no idea who the models were.

“It’s kind of titillating,” Rosato said of the mystery.

So far, Rosato and Connors haven’t found any leads about the women’s identity, but that hasn’t stopped visitors from speculating. Why does the woman with the beads look angry? Are the two redheads the same woman with different hairdos? What about the blonde in the hat and the blonde with a pink skirt? Could they be sisters? It’s anyone’s guess, until someone helps Connors and Rosato identify the models.

“If we could somehow get the word out to folks and identify some of these sitters,” Connors said. “He kept these – you know he thought a great deal about them.”

The Carl Cutler paintings will be on display at the Eagull Gallery on Main Street in Stonington through the first week of September. Anyone with clues about the identity of the models should contact Michael Connors at 367-5508.