Ralph Eugene Cahoon Jr.(1910-1982)
Ralph Eugene Cahoon Jr. was born in Chatham on Cape Cod in 1910. He grew up close to the harbor and enjoyed fishing, clamming and scalloping. Sketching was a favorite pastime for young Ralph, and his drawings were a regular feature in his high school newspaper. He also took a correspondence course in cartooning while still in high school.
After working two years at odd jobs to raise money for art school, he was accepted in 1929 to the School of Practical Art in Boston, which was dedicated to training its students in the field of commercial art. He studied there for two years and did well, but didn’t have enough money to continue.
In 1932, Ralph married Martha Farham, who’d been born near Boston in 1905, but whose family had moved to the Cape Code area in 1915.
Once Ralph and Martha were married, Martha taught Ralph the art of decorating furniture. They bought a small house in the village of Osterville and established a business selling their painted furniture as well as antiques. In 1945, they moved to a 1775 Georgian Colonial farmhouse in nearby Cotuit. They carefully restored and decorated it to provide a suitable setting for their increasingly popular decorated furniture and accessories.
Around 1953, one of their admirers, the wealthy art collector Joan Whitney Payson, convinced the Cahoons to do some primitive paintings that could be framed and hung on the wall. She showed their efforts at her Country Art Gallery on Long Island with great success and in 1954 gave them their first two-person show. It was a sell-out, as were virtually all of their shows there over the next 25 years. Soon, they were also showing their work annually on Nantucket and in Palm Beach and were being invited to exhibit at other galleries around the country. Vose Galleries of Boston – which didn’t normally show folk art at all – gave them a two-person exhibit in 1960. At the Cahoons’ own gallery in Cotuit, patrons included Kennedys, Mellons and du Ponts.
While the Cahoons decorated furniture, their styles, subject matter and palette were virtually indistinguishable. Their transition to easel painting marked the emergence of stylistic differences. Ralph soon established his trademark, the mermaid, and developed a smooth, polished style using jewellike colors and a saucy wit. The typical setting for the antics of his mermaids and their sailor admirers is 19th-century seaside New England, often with a lighthouse and clipper ship in the background and a hot-air balloon or two in the sky.
After Ralph died in 1982, the Cahoons’ home was transformed into an art museum named in their honor. Founded in 1984, the Cahoon Museum of American Art features a permanent collection divided between the Cahoons’ paintings and 19th-century American art. Martha, who was given lifetime rights to live in four rooms on the ground floor, died in 1999.
biography provided to p4A by the Cahoon Museum of American Art (www.cahoonmuseum.org).