Westport, Connecticut: Teaching America to Draw
In 1948 twelve Westport illustrators founded a school that taught America to draw by mail, in a town already home to 160 working illustrators.
Three stories posted across one week in September 2026 — the cheap houses and the train that turned a farm town into the largest art colony in the country, the twelve founders who set up a correspondence school in an old mill and became the biggest business in town, and the half-million-item picture morgue one of them gave to the public library. Each part below is the full post as published, with the reel it accompanied.
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Part I — Look Out the Window · Part II — A Stranger Fixed Your Drawing · Part III — He Gave It All Away
QUICK FACTS — THE TOWN THAT TAUGHT AMERICA TO DRAW
› 1908: George Hand Wright and his wife Anne buy a house and thirty acres — the start of the Westport artists’ colony
› 1900–1940s: more than 160 illustrators live and work in Westport, the years now called the golden age of American illustration
› 1920s: a town of under 5,000 claims the largest art colony in the United States in the pages of the New York Times
› October 1948: twelve illustrators open a correspondence art school in the old Sasco mill on the Saugatuck River — twenty-four lessons by mail, every one marked up by hand
› An illustrator’s morgue — also called a swipe file or clipping file, the name borrowed from newspaper morgues — was the reference library the whole trade ran on
› December 1956: the Westport Public Library accepts Albert Dorne’s pictorial research file, 500,000 clippings
› 1970–1972: a magazine exposé of the sister writing school, then bankruptcy
› December 31, 2016: the school, long since sold and moved to Wilton, closes after 68 years
Part I — Mon Sep 14, 2026 · Look Out the Window
By the 1940s, more than 160 illustrators were living and working in one small Connecticut town.
Cheap houses and a train to the magazines drew painters to Westport from 1900; by the 1940s more than 160 illustrators worked here.
They came for the cheap rent and the train.
Westport was one of the few Connecticut towns to sustain a farm economy through the nineteenth century, and when that finally thinned out, what it left behind was exactly what a working illustrator needed: a house he could afford, and a train that put him an hour from the magazines that paid him. Painters and illustrators began arriving from New York just after the turn of the century. In 1908 George Hand Wright and his wife Anne bought a house and thirty acres here. He’s still considered by many the founder of the Westport artists’ colony.
It compounded from there — artists moved to Westport because artists lived in Westport. By the 1920s a town of not quite 5,000 people was claiming, in the pages of the New York Times, the largest and most noted art colony in the United States. Records at the Westport Historical Society count more than 160 illustrators living and working here between 1900 and the 1940s. Not hobbyists. Professionals with deadlines, drawing the covers and the ads the whole country looked at every week.
And when you need a face by Thursday, you don’t hire a model. You look out the window. Everyone from the butcher to the fireman might turn up on a magazine cover in a grocery store in Nebraska, without ever leaving Fairfield County.
By 1948 there were enough working artists in town to fill a small college, and no college for them to fill. Somebody was going to do something about that.
What they did: Part II.
Above: an original illustration, in the spirit of the coastal covers of the period.
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Part II — Wed Sep 16, 2026 · A Stranger Fixed Your Drawing
In 1948, twelve illustrators bet that they could teach the entire country to draw — by mail.
In October 1948 twelve illustrators opened a mail-order art school in the old Sasco mill; it became the largest business in town.
After the war, America believed you could learn anything through the post office. Radio repair. Watch repair. Rabbit farming. How to stop stammering.
That October, twelve of them set up in the old Sasco mill by the Saugatuck River. The idea belonged to Albert Dorne, who had left school after the seventh grade, managed four newsstands in New York at thirteen, and won ten straight professional prizefights before an eleventh opponent knocked him cold and he decided boxing was not the road to becoming an artist. At twenty-two he was earning five hundred dollars a week. He approached America’s most famous working illustrator, and ten more followed.
The flaw turned up in the first mail bags. Each founder had written his own course, and nearly every applicant wanted the same one. So they threw out twelve curricula and wrote a single set of manuals instead.
What they built was a factory for encouragement. Twenty-four lessons went out by mail, one at a time, the next one sent only after you finished the last. You completed an assignment, mailed it back, and a working artist marked it up by hand and returned it with notes. Instructors sat in Westport doing nothing else, all day, for years. It became the largest business in town, outgrew the mill, and moved into a modern complex on the river — where more than forty thousand students were taught by people almost none of them ever met.
You know how this ends, because every mail-order dream ends the same way. The company expanded into things it had no business expanding into, and in 1970 a magazine exposé took apart the writing school it owned. Enrollment collapsed. In 1972 the whole operation filed for bankruptcy.
But for a quarter of a century, a town of a few thousand people on a Connecticut river mailed out the idea that anyone, anywhere, could be taught to make something good. We think that holds up.
What stayed behind: Part III.
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Part III — Sat Sep 19, 2026 · He Gave It All Away
An illustrator’s most valuable possession was never his talent. It was his filing cabinet.
In 1956 Albert Dorne gave his half-million-item picture file to the Westport Public Library, where anyone could use it.
The mail-order school outlived its bankruptcy by decades. New owners bought it, moved it out of town, and kept it running until December 31, 2016. But here’s what we keep thinking about.
In 1956, at the height of everything, Albert Dorne gave his picture file to the Westport Public Library. Over five hundred thousand items.
If you’ve never worked as an illustrator, that means nothing. So: before the internet, an illustrator kept a morgue. A clipping library of photographs and tearsheets, filed by subject, built up over decades. Draw a 1912 fire engine by Friday. A Dutch door. A particular kind of saddle. You did not look it up — there was nowhere to look it up. You went to your file, or you were finished.
Dorne’s was legendary. He kept full-time help clipping pictures of everything from horse bridles to car parts, and when an assignment came in someone would pull the right reference and leave it waiting on his drawing board. It was the working memory of an entire career.
And he gave it to the town library, where anybody could walk in and use it. That’s the same instinct as the school itself, only quieter. Dorne’s whole bet was that the knowledge wasn’t supposed to be a secret. Not the lessons. Not the morgue. None of it.
Somebody in Nebraska opened a binder and learned to draw. That’s the whole story.
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