Remembrance: Ralph Carpentier Was An Artist, A Craftsman, A Father, And A Great Teacher

Every once in a while, a seemingly insignificant crumb of geography becomes the epicenter for a cultural awakening, something much larger than the place would seem able to hold.In the 1950s, the tiny East Hampton fishing village of Springs became one of those anomalies, giving birth to some of the greatest art of the American 20th century.

With the death, on February 19, of landscape painter Ralph Carpentier, Springs—and the art world in general—said goodbye to one of the last great painters of that period.

“All of those guys, the artists from that period, are leaving the building, so to speak,” lamented art curator and friend Julie Keyes.

Of the artists who found their voice in Springs, many, like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, embraced a new abstract expressionism in their work. Mr. Carpentier, lured from Greenwich Village to the East End both by the Springs artist colony and the legendary unique light on the South Fork, eschewed the trend toward abstracts and stayed true to his roots and his first love: painting landscapes in the traditional Dutch style.

“Ralph admired the Dutch masters, and painters like Fitz Hugh Lane, a Scottish-American painter in that same tradition,” said Pamela Williams, a longtime friend and gallery owner who represented Mr. Carpentier for decades, first at East Hampton’s Lizan Tops Gallery and then at her own Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett. “He liked this style of painting, and even though everybody else was going in a more abstract direction, this is what he most enjoyed doing, and he pursued it. He knew all those people, and they were friends, but this is what he liked to do.”

Ms. Williams hung a show of Mr. Carpentier’s work at East Hampton’s Ashawagh Hall for a reception held after his interment at Green River Cemetery. “I called him ‘Dr. Sky,’” she said, for his unique ability to capture the rich luminescence of the East End’s skyscapes. “He loved this area, and he began painting out here when there were just farms. His work is a record of the way it looked then. The sense of smallness you feel when you look at the sky and the land—it’s humbling. And he captured that.”

While his paintings were done in the studio, Mr. Carpentier was a practitioner of the plein air method for his drawings. He could be seen tooling around the East End’s bays and marshes, fields, and estuaries in a nondescript brown pickup truck, searching for the perfect vantage point from which to capture a vista that had grabbed his attention.

Born in Queens on October 29, the day of the great stock market crash in 1929, Mr. Carpentier earned his Bachelor of Science in education from New York University in 1951, was drafted into the Korean War, then returned to NYU, where he completed his Master of Arts degree in 1955. He taught at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx for one semester before deciding to look elsewhere—and found that the East Hampton School District was looking for an art teacher.

In East Hampton, he found himself in the midst of an artistic awakening populated by the likes of de Kooning, Pollock and John Ferren, and, after teaching for five years, he left the school district to devote more time to painting.

But Mr. Carpentier didn’t live in some rarefied world exclusive to the artistically gifted. Like thousands of others who have left conventional careers to pursue their dreams on the East End, he held a wide range of jobs to keep body and soul together while refining his art and supporting his family. He taught art at the Hampton Day School in Bridgehampton, was a visual arts instructor at Southampton College, and worked as a commercial fisherman.

“Ralph had a very sane view of the world. He was a very balanced man of both intellectual and manual abilities,” said Arnold Leo, a friend for nearly 40 years. “Early on, Ralph worked with Ted Lester’s haul seine crew.”

Following his passion to celebrate the unique history and character of the East End, Mr. Carpentier was the driving force behind the East Hampton Town Marine Museum in Amagansett. “He was the one who really put that museum together,” said Mr. Leo. Dedicated to the history of the relationship between the East End and the sea, the museum showcases Mr. Carpentier’s many talents.

“Ralph was a very accomplished artist, but he was also a great craftsman,” said Mr. Leo. “He could make anything. So when Everett Rattray, who came from one of the founding families of East Hampton, wanted to put together a museum devoted to the history of the baymen, he brought Ralph on board and named him the first director of the museum.” Mr. Carpentier held that post from 1975 to 1989.

“That museum is really the creation of Ralph Carpentier,” said Mr. Leo. “He oversaw the collection of the artifacts. He built the exhibits—wonderful little detailed dioramas. There have been some changes over the years, but, to this day, most of what you’re looking at when you go to that museum is Ralph’s work.”

The theme that repeats from everyone who knew him is the deep love he had for the East End. Peter Garnham, director of the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce in the late 1970s, met Mr. Carpentier when he saw an illustration that he wanted to use for a chamber brochure, “I called him up, told him who I was, and asked if I could use it. And he said, ‘Oh, sure, go ahead. It’s for East Hampton, right? No charge. Maybe one day you can buy me a beer—how about that?’” From that interaction grew a 40-year friendship.

Mr. Garnham remembers a time when the two worked together repairing the belfry at the Clinton Academy. “Ralph and I were sitting up there, looking out over East Hampton Main Street, and talking about the fact that when the academy was built, there weren’t many other houses here, and how, at that time, you could probably have sat up in that belfry and had a clear shot of the ocean. It would be 200 years before those houses at Georgica would be built.

“Another time, we were driving around all the fields on Gardiners Island, and he said, ‘East Hampton must have looked like this once upon a time.’ Sort of wistful. He loved the natural beauty of this place. He didn’t resent the changes, but I think he regretted them.

“Ralph was a lovely, sweet, gentle man,” continued Mr. Garnham. “The arts community can be pretty nasty sometimes, but I’ve never met a single person who had anything nasty to say about him.”

Evidence of that was in the crowd that turned out to Ashawagh Hall for the funeral reception. “No one ever had a bad word to say about him,” echoed Ms. Williams. “There must have been 200 people there: fireman, policemen, actors, artists, writers. He was a fine painter and a wonderful teacher, because he was very generous with his support. And he was a dear friend to so many people.”

His daughter, Martha Carpentier, spoke eloquently at the graveside service of growing up as the daughter of one of America’s great landscape painters, and one of the East End’s great men:

For me, it is always about 1965, give or take. The sun is always shining, and it is always summer. My beautiful gypsy stepmother has taken me to Louse Point, and she is sunbathing in her bikini while I swim, or, on the inlet side, dig in the muck with my toes for clams.

Or I am making mud pies with my cousins under the scrub oaks behind Fort Pond Boulevard. Or Anna Moss and I are furiously pedaling our bikes past Bell Woods to Amagansett, because the cool kids hang out at Indian Wells. Or the artists are having another bacchanalian clambake on the beach—the clams, lobsters, corn-on-the-cob roasting in the sand, sparks from the big bonfire flitting upward, and the ocean ominous and vast in the darkening night.

And where is Ralph Carpentier? He is a busy man. If he’s not pounding shingles or painting in his studio, he’s probably at a meeting—Baymen’s Association, Artists Alliance, Architectural Review Board. We all know how generously he gave of his time to the preservation of this community he loved so much.

Or he’s sailing his New Haven Sharpie, the Heron, a shallow-draft 19th-century wooden ketch made to fish the waters of Long Island Sound, which he lovingly restored. For there was nothing the hands of Ralph Carpentier could not restore to its pristine origins or make from scratch. From the largest things, like our house, which he built, or the Marine Museum he created for this town—every installation and display of which, from the history of the menhaden fishing industry, to the artifacts of local shipwrecks, to the diorama of the East End, designed, built, crafted, and painted by his hands—to the smallest things: pottery thrown on his wheel and baked in his kiln, puppets and stage sets, ships in bottles, book illustrations, films, frames, figurines, and even a perfect miniature Chippendale jewelry chest for [wife] Horty.

For Ralph Carpentier was, first and foremost, a creator—a father, a husband, a craftsman, an artist, and also a great teacher, always willing to help anyone who stood at his side and wanted to know how it was made or how to make it.