Described as an artist whose "love of nature amounted to a passion," Charles Kaelin was a respected member of the artists' colony at Rockport, Massachusetts, during the early twentieth century.

The son of a Swiss lithographer, he initiated his formal training in his hometown of Cincinnati, studying at the McMicken School of Design and privately under the Impressionist painter John Henry Twachtman. Moving to New York in 1879, he continued his studies at the Art Students League and then worked as a lithographer.

Returning to Cincinnati in 1892, he joined the prestigious Strobridge Lithographic Company as a designer of theater posters and calendars and spent his free time making sketching trips to southern Ohio and Kentucky, where he made delicate pastel landscapes in the poetic manner of Twachtman. Kaelin made his first trip to Gloucester, Massachusetts, on the Cape Ann peninsula, in 1900 and continued to make seasonal visits there until settling permanently in the nearby town of Rockport in 1916. It was about this time that he evolved an advanced divisionist technique rooted in European Post-lmpressionism wherein emphatic strokes of crayon or oil paint are tightly woven together to create an intricate tapestry of line and color.

He applied this method, which contemporary critics deemed "daring" and "experimental", to his many depictions of the harbors, coastlines, and woodlands of Cape Ann.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton