Aldro T. Hibbard

Aldro T. Hibbard (1886-1972) was named after a 16th-century Italian naturalist, making his eventual career as a Post-Impressionist landscape painter feel almost inevitable. Hibbard was best known for his images of the seashore town of Rockport, Massachusetts, as well as his winterscapes of Vermont. A lifelong proponent of painting en plein air, often trudging miles into the early morning Vermont wilderness to find the perfect setting, he told his art students: “Beware of too much studio landscape painting. Direct contact gives you the rare elements, moods of short duration.”

Hibbard was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and grew up on Cape Cod and in Dorchester. He studied art at the Massachusetts Normal School, the Massachusetts College of Art, and the Boston Museum School. Simultaneous with his art studies was a passionate pursuit of baseball; though he received offers to play professionally, his love for painting eventually won out. Between 1913 and 1915 he traveled across Europe on scholarship, studying the art of old masters. Upon his return to the states he began teaching art at Boston University. In winter of 1915 he made his first trip to Vermont, where for the rest of his life he would spend most of his winters (a highly unusual choice), and the remainder of the year in Cape Ann and Rockport, where he established the Rockport Art Association, later renamed the Hibbard School of Painting.

Hibbard was known as one of the foremost interpreters of winter of his time, sometimes called the “dean of the Frozen River School.” He painted both the rural deep woods and the traditional activities of Vermont townspeople, like sugaring maple trees and cutting ice blocks. He was quick to remark to students that pure white does not exist in nature, that they should instead observe the colors that are absorbed and reflected by snow at different times of day. One critic wrote of Hibbard’s winter landscapes: “Others paint snow that looks like white paint streaked with blue and yellow. Hibbard paints snow that never looks like anything else but snow…subtle and more penetrating in his observation of delicate nuances of gray.”