Go To Biography List  |  Go To Artist Page

Frederick J. Mulhaupt

Gloucester Harbor in winter, schooners at full mast, gill netters, and of course, Motif No 1, were some of the favorite subjects for the brushwork of Frederick Mulhaupt, who is now regarded as one of Cape Ann’s premier Impressionist artists and the “Dean of the Cape Ann School of Art.”

Rockport, Missouri (where Mulhaupt was born), and Rockport, Massachusetts (where he painted, and was a member of the Art Association), are not near each other, nor are they alike, but the coincidental name sameness is part of the artist’s biography.

The young artist studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1890s, then moved to New York City in 1904 where he resided at the Salmagundi Club, which is one of the premier art organizations in the United States. Tonalism, as practiced by many of his peers who studied in Germany, did not appeal to Mulhaupt, so he contin- ued his study of en plein air painting in Paris and England. James Abbott McNeil Whistler painted in the fishing village of St.Ives along the rugged Cornish coastline after 1880, and this picturesque spot was discovered, among others, by Mulhaupt and the Lynn beach artist, C.E.L. Green (1844-1915).

Frederick Mulhaupt first arrived in Cape Ann around 1907, and he became a year round resident in 1922, and a part of the artistic community until his death in 1938.

The bustling harbor of Gloucester became the focus of many of Mulhaupt’s paintings, and some of the most evocative are sun-lit winter afternoon scenes of working fishing boats tied to the Italian Wharf, while other vessels are ice-bound. The color burnt sienna appears in many of his paintings, but it is contrasted with subtle hues of white to great effect. And in his compositions, Mulhaupt often relied on foreshortening as he added visible brushstrokes to the canvas.

Mulhaupt, his wife Agnes L. Kingsley and their son, Frederick, lived in the growing artist mecca of Rocky Neck, the colorful section of East Gloucester, while he continued his career and taught painting to enthusiastic students. Awards were conferred early on, such as the Philadelphia Sesqui-Centennial Landscape Medal (1925), the Gedney Bunce Prize for Marine Painting by the Conn- ecticut Academy of Fine Arts (1927), and an honorable mention from the National Arts Club in New York City (1929).

Charles Gruppe and his son, Emile, moved to Gloucester in 1925 after seeing a Mulhaupt painting in a New York City exhibit- tion. Emile once stated that the artist “got the smell of Gloucester on canvas. He captured the mood of the place-and that’s worth all the good drawing of a hundred lesser painters.”