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.
Watch the professionally-made video free on YouTube at https://youtu.be/nAzMNMuLX6k.
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