Stephen Morgan Etnier, (1903-1984)
A painter of landscapes, marine, portrait and genre, Stephen Etnier was born in York, Pennsylvania, and maintained studios in New York City , South Harpswell and Popham Beach, Maine. He studied at the Yale Art School, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and privately with Rockwell Kent and John Carroll.
A major 1998 retrospective of Etnier’s work at the Portland Museum of Art, Journeys Over Water, helped awaken interest in the extraordinary images the artist produced during his journeys to the Bahamas. Not only do they possess the enchantment of the islands and capture what many know as their special light (much as he did in his Maine paintings as well), but Etnier may be the foremost interpreter of these islands’ lands and people and their interaction, again, much as he was in Maine during the largest part of the 20th Century.