Ruth Mahoney - Pakatakan Hotel and Art Colony

A 1-2               The PAKATAKAN HOTEL / ART COLONY – Arkville, NY

Original built in 1886 as the Hoffman Hotel.  It served as the gathering center of the Pakatakan Artist Colony.  At age 15 (1945) Ruth worked at light housekeeping for Alice Mann, an artist in one of the studios in the Colony. In her 16^th and 17^th summers she worked at the Pakatakan Hotel, earning money for nurse’s school at the Vassar Brothers School of Nursing.  

Credit to the painter: Margaret Leveson, who now owns and has been using the 1887 studio of J. Francis Murphy since 1977, has painted extensively on the grounds of the Pakatakan Artists' Colony. In 2008, she was invited by The Catskill Center's Erpf Gallery to exhibit more than 25 of her paintings of the Colony's cottages and interiors.

THE PAKATAKAN ART COLONY

The following material was adapted, from an article in the Catskill Center News, April, 2008.

The Pakatakan Artists Colony was a turn-of-the-century gathering of artists who spent time in the small hamlet of Arkville, NY. The colony began prior to 1886 when a prominent landscape painter from New York City, J. Francis Murphy, found accommodation in Arkville and urged Peter Hoffman, a local businessman and proprietor of the house where he boarded, to build a hotel, today called the Pakatakan Hotel. Murphy brought his painter friends to visit the area. In 1887 Alexander H. Wyant arrived here from the Adirondacks. Others who came on a regular basis were Parker Mann, E. Loyal Field, Frank Russell Green, H.D. Kruseman Van Elten, George Smillie, Walter Clark, Arthur Parton, Ernest C. Rost, and J. Woodhull Adams.

In 1988, after five years of research and documentation, the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development was able to obtain the nomination for the Pakitakan Artists Colony to be recognized by the National Register as the Pakatakan Artists’ Colony Historic District. The district contains 33 contributing buildings and two contributing structures.

Many artists stayed in the hotel, but some purchased property and built their own studios. J. Francis Murphy and Adah Murphy built their first one-story shingle style studio in 1887. The artists did not want their houses to dominate nature but attempted to blend them with the rounded tree-covered mountains of the Catskills. What were built on a grand scale where the artists' studios, with windows often rising two stories in height and facing north to bring in the light. The artists of the Pakatakan colony were different from their predecessors, the Hudson River School. Their landscapes tended to be more interpretive than descriptive. They preferred intimate scenes often of dawn or dusk with toned atmospheric views and the places they painted were more generalized than recognizable locations. Their concerns were to produce an art expressive of mood and insights into the human spirit.

Because so many of the artists had established property in the district and used the hotel as a gathering place, it is reasonable to assume that Ruth encountered several, in addition to Alice Mann, while working at the hotel.  Perhaps this is where the painting bug took its first bite.