Video: The Tryon Artists Colony

During the late 1800s “country colonies” came about where professional artists and serious amateurs gathered seasonally, to paint and experiment together. Away from cities, by sea or lakes or in the mountains, some locales morphed into magnets where many artists chose to settle. The picturesque mountain village Tryon, North Carolina emerged around 1900 as the American South’s most noted artists colony.

Its art community attracted women as well as men. Many were active as well in cities like Boston and Chicago. Tryon’s temperate winters, easy access by train, and pretty scenery for landscape painting were attractive. So were modest cost and its informal atmosphere. The list of artists who visited, sojourned repeatedly, or settled permanently is very long; art history scholars continue to discover more personalities who worked in Tryon.

A number of publications and museum exhibitions, during the past quarter-century, have shown vintage artworks from the Tryon colony and featured artists who worked there. A 2025 show Masters in the Mountains: Early Work from the Tryon Artist Colony was at Earl Scruggs Center museum in North Carolina. An illustrated lecture was filmed there. That program has been edited for quality by a professional film maker, who added archival film clips and still images that weren’t in the show. Images and rich information are packed into a concise 46 minutes.

Start: Introduction to the Tryon Artists Colony
00:21 William Kruse
00:56 Jane Saxman Brown
01:15 R. Henry Scadin
02:02 Emma Payne Erskine
02:25 William Gillette
03:35 Lois Wilcox
05:59 Amelia Watson
08:45 Gabrielle Clements
10:51 Homer Ellertson
17:15 Lawrence Mazzanovich
21:13 George C. Aid
25:26 Josephine Sibley Couper
28:08 Elliott Daingerfield
30:18 John Sylvan Brown
33:08 Alfred Colby Hockings
35:56 Stella Sassoon
44:34 Charles Quest
46:13 Ending Credits