Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Truro, Cape Cod. Paris and the South of France. For most of his life artist Milton Wright (1920-2005) lived near the water. “Maybe he wasn’t conscious of the fact,” says his wife, Breene, “but the reason is the light.” The intensity, clarity, tone, and transparency of Wright’s work changed with the atmosphere and light of each location.

    The artist lived and studied in France from 1948-1950 under the GI Bill, during a time when a fierce controversy was raging between abstract and realist painters. Picasso and Matisse were his contemporaries. Wright, the grand-nephew of the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, championed American painters as much as he admired their French counterparts. “I think some of the best painting is being done [in the U.S.] today,” Wright said in a 1950 French radio interview. “American painting . . . isn’t just a re-hash of European styles anymore; it’s a very vital, original art.”

During the 1950s, 60s, and 70s from his studio at Great Hollow Beach in North Truro, Wright painted the changing Cape Cod Bay in every season. He painted the Pamet River and the houses and hills of Truro. Provincetown was a favorite haunt of Milton and Breene, who married in 1946. “We liked to hang out at the Mayflower Café,” reminisces Breene. “It was lively and fun, always full of fishermen.” The couple liked the continental feel of the town, the many people speaking Portuguese. Milton’s mentor and lifelong friend Marston “Bud” Hodgin, Dean of Fine Arts at Miami University in Ohio, had introduced Wright to the Outer Cape mecca for painters, writers, and playwrights in 1938. Bud painted in Provincetown each summer, and Wright followed suit in 1946, 1947, 1950 and 1951. His work is in the permanent collections of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and Truro’s Highland House Museum, as well as in the Denver Art Museum, Dayton Art Institute, Miami University, and Long Island University.

Milton, whom his wife says painted every day of his life, referred to himself as a “colorist.” Pierre Descargues, one of Europe’s most prominent art critics of the time, observed in “Arts” that “[Wright’s landscapes] . . . in turn fine, delicate and enlivened by colorful details and again possessing masses more somberly expressed—and in the latter case quite contrastive between violent colors, indicate a man with an adventurous spirit and a sensitive heart.” And this from Les Nouvelles Littéraires: “His greens, his reds are vivid . . .”.

At home on the Cape, the artist, who painted in oil, acrylic, watercolors, and gouache, switched subject matter from the old port of Marseilles to the fishing fleet at McMillan Pier in Provincetown. But his style was consistent. His early works exhibit a strong palette with Cubist overtones, while his later works were more impressionistic in style.

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A brochure from a 2006 Truro Fine Art Studio retrospective of Wright’s work says, “His energetic and almost frenetic brushwork in the later paintings, mostly landscapes, was a unique method he developed that heightened his bold use of color, making each blade of grass stand out along the dunes as an integral part of the Cape Cod landscape, drenched in sunlight and shadow.”

In 1977 Wright retired, moving his wife and their children, Martha and Lorin, to the family’s cottage at Great Hollow Beach. He became involved in the local community as a long-time member of the Truro Historical Society, serving on its Board of Directors and on the Save the Highland Lighthouse Committee, which raised the money to move the endangered structure from eroding cliffs. It was this very lighthouse that had been a favorite subject of his painting.  

Janice Randall Rohlf is editor in chief at Cape Cod Life Publications.

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