
The Famous Artists School opened in October 1948 in the old Sasco mill by the Saugatuck River, founded by twelve illustrators led by Albert Dorne with Norman Rockwell; two hundred dollars bought twenty-four lessons mailed out one at a time, and at its height the school had more than forty thousand students.
Records at the Westport Historical Society count more than 160 illustrators living and working in Westport between 1900 and the 1940s; the Westport Country Playhouse opened in 1931 in a converted 1835 tannery.
Why People Visit Westport Connecticut
Westport draws people who love the shore, the arts, and a good story. It is a Revolutionary-War landing site with a Minute Man on the beach, a colonial shipping village turned arts colony, and a Long Island Sound shoreline of beaches, river, and marsh. Visitors come for the rare mix — history you can stand on at Compo, theater and music in the summer, and a refined New England coast an easy train ride from New York.