Edwin Dickinson - South Wellfleet Inn

Dickinson worked on one final major painting, South Wellfleet Inn, 1955-60. In later years Dickinson gave 1950 as the date for the painting's beginning, but on 2 August 1955 he wrote in his journal, "Began a 44⅝ × 33¼ of the South Wellfleet Inn," giving, as he usually (but not always) did, and contrary to standard practice, the measurement of the width first. Based on a drawing that he had made of the building in 1939 before it burned down, and a premier coup that he painted in 1951 of a scene that included part of the painting of the scene, with a second canvas with a depiction of the scene visible on the first depicted canvas. South Wellfleet Inn carries this idea further: it depicts the inn partially obscured by a canvas on which is painted a series of diminishing canvases and inns collapsing in upon themselves in infinite regress, slipping backward on the left and twisting downward at an accelerated rate on the right. Remarkably, the inclusion of the painting in the depicted scene sets off a chain reaction in which the apparently objective pictorial record has the effect of reenacting the hotel's collapse in fire sixteen years earlier. It has been suggested that the picture's imagery also symbolically reenacts the deaths of his mother and of the brother whom he idolized, who jumped from Dickinson's sixth-floor apartment window. This idea is also supported by the photograph of a "cure cottage" such as the one in which his mother died at the Saranac Lake tuberculosis sanatarium behind the grimly forbidding windows of the upper story, a memory of which may have been awakened by the inn's upper windows.