Label
Joseph C. Murphy
dates unknown
Riverside Hotel, Saugatuck, Michigan
1915 | oil on canvas
Notes: Very little is known about Joseph Murphy beyond the fact that he painted this view of the Riverside Hotel at Shriver’s Bend near the mouth of the Kalamazoo River. The hotel became Ox-Bow Inn, the main structure of the Summer School of Painting, commonly known as Ox-Bow.
The painting, possibly done from an early postcard, represents a style of work that just predates the Impressionism brought from Europe to Saugatuck by the Summer School’s founders.
Collection: Saugatuck Douglas History Center
Gift of: Henry and Claradine Gleason Trust
Accession: 2020.35.01Label
From "Collecting the Lakeshore" 2025-2026 at the History Center main floor gallery
Joseph C. Murphy
Dates unknown - late nineteenth to early twentieth century
Riverside Hotel
1915 | oil on canvas
This view of the Riverside Hotel embodies the layered history of its subject, the Riverside Hotel. Built in the 1860s as the first landing on the Kalamazoo River from Lake Michigan, the site included lodging, housing, warehouses, wooden moorings, brakewalls, and fishing shanties. When the new river channel opened in 1906, this area became a literal backwater as shifting sands closed the river mouth and created a lagoon. Less than a decade later, the Riverside Hotel became the summer home of the Ox-Bow Summer School of Painting led by Frederik Frary Fursman, Walter Marshall Clute, Edgar Rupprecht, and Thomas Eddy Tallmadge.
Very little is known about the painter Joseph C. Murphy beyond the fact that he painted this view of the Riverside Hotel at Shriver’s Bend near the mouth of the Kalamazoo River. The painting was likely owned by Clarence Lynds, who married into the Shriver family and sold the Riverside Hotel to Fursman in 1920.
The painting, possibly done from an early postcard, represents a style of work that predates the Impressionism brought from Europe to Saugatuck by the Summer School’s founders.
Gift of the Henry and Claradine Gleason Trust
Accession 2020.35.01
