The Ox-Bow School of Painting and the Arts, The Ox-Bow Inn

Location: Private Road north end Park Street, Saugatuck

Date: 1873-96

This school is located in one of the most admired natural landscapes in the Midwest, and founded as an outgrowth of the great French and American rebellion against traditional indoor ’studio’ painting of the time that sought quaint waterside villages and landscapes to paint in the outdoors. It was, as well, an escape from the crowded and dirty cities of the time. The school had its beginnings in 1910 at the Bandle family home on Saugatuck’s Holland Street (at 3421 Riverside Drive) where daughter Jessie Bandle, a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, brought groups of artists here to relax and spend their summers painting the local landscape and villagescape. In 1913 this group of teacher-artists moved to the abandoned hotel at Shriver’s Landing at the area called the “Ox-Bow” near where the Kalamazoo River flows into Lake Michigan. Many of these early artists, including John C. Johansen, John Norton, Frederick F. Fursman, Walter M. Clute, Thomas Eddy Tallmadge, and Edgar and Isobel Rupprecht, were of national prominence—and were later joined by artists of equal rank, including Albert Krehbiel, Wallace Kirkland, Ed Pasche, Bill Oldendorf, LeRoy Neiman, Shel Silverstein and Claus Oldenburg. It is told that Jim Henson invented Kermit the Frog at Ox-Bow and Burr Tillstrom, the early pioneer of television puppet show days, was a frequent Ox-Bow personage. Considerable additional land was given by the famous American architect and architectural historian Thomas Eddy Tallmadge (“Tallmadge Woods”). With its beginnings as an outgrowth of “bohemian” urban culture, the school has continued as a place of artistic innovation and diversity. Visitors are welcome only on certain days. See the Ox-Bow school website.