Leon Kroll

(1884-1974)

In 1927, at the age of forty-three Leon Kroll was fortunate to meet Marc Chagall, Aristide Maillol, and Henri Matisse while traveling in France with the French artist, Robert Delaunay. However, it was another famous French artist, Paul Cezanne, who most influenced his verdant and craggy landscapes of Rockport.

Born in New York City, Abraham Leon Kroll studied at the Art Students League, with Ohio-born John H. Twachtman, and in 1903, while attending the National Academy of Design, Kroll was awarded a scholarship to study painting in Europe. When his painting of a female nude won a Grand Prix prize in Paris in 1908, Leon Kroll began a career of winning major prizes in America, and portraying sensuous nude or semi-nude women in naturalistic settings, especially in and around the several stone quarry pools in Rockport.

Leon Kroll discovered Gloucester in 1912, and was always delighted to return to Cape Ann during the summer months, where he and his Parisian wife, Genevieve-Marie, lived in Folly Cove. They were neighbors of Folly Cove designers and textile print- makers, Virginia Lee Burton and her sculptor husband, George Demetrios, and other sculptors, Paul Manship and Walter Hancock. At the age of ninety, Kroll died in Gloucester, and he was buried in the Locust Grove Cemetery in Rockport.

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