NEW YORK — Ralph Eugene Cahoon Jr. (American, 1910-1982) became famous after he began painting scenes of mermaids cavorting with sailors. A prolific artist, his works were popular in his lifetime and have only gained more fans since his death.
A native Cape Codder, Cahoon grew up fishing and clamming as well as sketching the coast around his hometown of Chatham, Massachusetts. He married his wife, Martha, in 1932, and the two shared an interest in art. She taught him how to decorate furniture, and they were successful at this enterprise for a good while. In the early 1950s he began painting his own designs and created his first mermaid painting, which would change the course of his career. “In 1953, one of the Cahoon’s customers, art patroness Joan Whitney Payson, convinced the couple to frame some of their scenes for her to exhibit at the Country Art Gallery, a new business she was opening on Long Island,” according to the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit, Massachusetts. The mermaid paintings were an instant hit with the public and were exhibited at prominent galleries in the area and in Boston.
Artwork can be proudly and emphatically regional. Florida had its Highwaymen, known for painting vivid sunsets and beachy landscapes, but when it comes to Cape Cod, Nantucket island and coastal New England areas, nautical themes rule. Nantucket auctioneer Rafael Osona attributes Cahoon’s enduring appeal to the playful nature of his mermaid paintings, especially the ones in which the mermaids are a bit “naughty” or in high spirits. In some, they are shown topless on a beach under a sign saying “topless swim suits forbidden,” frolicking with sailors or riding whales. “A lot of artists here on Nantucket have a niche. His niche is the mermaids,” he said.
Osona remembers being about 10 years old when he first spied Cahoon’s mermaids displayed along the Nantucket wharfs outside a local gallery. He didn’t think too much about them at the time, but he and his company, Rafael Osona Auctions, have sold their fair share of Cahoon’s mermaid paintings during the last 45 years. At least one Cahoon painting has been a marquee offering in his annual August marine auction.
A recent example was the oil-on-Masonite painting American Seamen’s Friend Society, which attained $65,000 plus the buyer’s premium in August 2023. Osona noted that near the height of Cahoon’s popularity, he sometimes painted quickly to meet customer demand. This painting was not rushed, and shows much attention to detail as well as features that are of local historical interest.
“It doesn’t have a lot of the giggle factor, but it was big and had scrimshaw and it was finely done,” Osona said.
Scrimshaw has long been a highly desirable marine collectible, and in American Seamen’s Friend Society and several of his other paintings, Cahoon pays homage to scrimshaw and the importance of the now-defunct whaling industry in places such as Cape Cod and Nantucket by setting the scene within a framed scrimshaw banner on the canvas.
The painting depicts two captains sitting in comb-back Windsor chairs that are lavishly decorated; Cahoon sometimes left the chair backs unpainted, but in this painting, he festooned the chairs in unsparing, abundant detail. The captains are seen enjoying a surf and turf dinner while being waited on by two mermaids who each wear several strands of pearls. A few American ships are seen in the background. The captains’ planned voyage is detailed on a poster hanging behind one of the men, showing stops in Hong Kong, Canton and Calcutta.
“It has the scrimshaw, and that’s kind of popular here with people that hang them in their homes on Nantucket,” Osona added, noting it was purchased by a gentleman who is a seaman who liked the idea of the existence of a seamen’s society.
Cahoon’s paintings typically display a sense of humor, but works that include historical and local details are favored by collectors. “If you have a piece of Nantucket, like one of our lighthouses in the background, then that’s golden,” Osona said. One example is The Sea Fairies, which shows three mermaids sitting on a buoy, holding lyres or harps with a lighthouse and a clipper ship shown in the background. This painting, named for an Alfred Tennyson poem, made $55,000 plus the buyer’s premium in August 2021 at Rafael Osona Auctions. Lines of the poem are written on a banner on the verso: “White Limbs, Unrobed In A Crystal Air, Sweet Faces, Rounded Arms, And Bosoms, Prest To Little Harps Of Gold …”
In Cahoon’s world, mermaids are often interacting with men, usually sailors or sea captains. In Widow Walks, a few mermaids, shown at the far right of the work, join local women who stand on top of their homes’ widow’s walks, peering out to sea with binoculars in hopes of spotting their husbands returning home. This painting realized $42,500 plus the buyer’s premium in 2023 at Eldred’s.
Many of Cahoon’s paintings were complex scenes, filled with buildings, ships and a dozen figures or more. Representing a departure from this approach is Cape Cod Sea Captains, which depicts two sea captains sitting on a bench, flanking a comely mermaid. It brought $30,000 plus the buyer’s premium in July 2021 at Eldred’s.
Another lively scene is Seaman’s Bethel, likely referencing the landmark in New Bedford, Massachusetts that was built in 1832 for seamen. This painting, showing seamen catching mermaids with nets and one hapless mermaid caged in a circus rail car, sold for $28,000 plus the buyer’s premium at Cottone Auctions in September 2018.
Humor, whimsy and high jinks are ever-present features of Cahoon’s mermaid paintings. While mermaids might not be real, Cahoon’s mermaids are as alluring as the sirens of myth, spellbinding art collectors for decades past and decades to come.