Agnes Pelton is known better today for her
western landscapes and her modernist works, but the Brooklyn-based painter had
deep artistic roots on Long Island. This was especially true of her long
relationship with the East End, which was the summer haunt of many prominent
Brooklyn families during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the
Peltons. As an artist based in New York and the East End of Long Island, Pelton
showed regularly at the Ardsley Studios and the MacDowell Club, where her works
were favorably reviewed alongside her peers, including Charles Demuth, Marsden
Hartley, Robert Henri, Leon

Kroll and Jerome Myers.



Beginning circa 1918, Pelton had a studio space in Greenport, on the North Fork
of Long Island. Not long after, she became a fixture in the Hamptons, painting
its landscape vistas and creating portraits of its residents while exhibiting
her works in shows organized at the Memorial Hall in Southampton and at the
Bridgehampton Community House. She became enamored with the old Hayground
Windmill, located halfway between Watermill and Bridgehampton, and by the early
1920s had built a small addition to the mill, housing a residence and studio
space. Capitalizing on the solitude of her unusual abode, Pelton was thoroughly
influenced by her surroundings; and yet her time living in the Hayground
Windmill was perhaps the most socially driven period of her career. It was characterized
by an outpour of portraiture—depictions of her friends and neighbors, and
summer visitors to the Hamptons. One of her most prominent patrons was Samuel
Parrish, the founder of Bridgehampton’s esteemed Parrish Art Museum. During a
trip devoted to painting on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands in 1923, she noted as
being from “Hay Crowned Windmill, Water Mill, Long Island…” Pelton would remain
a regular fixture in the Hamptons even after her move to the American
Southwest, and would return through the 1930s to exhibit and discuss her
artwork to local audiences.