Aldro Hibbard was a small child when his family moved to the Boston suburb of Roxbury. Another move took the Hibbards to nearby Dorchester, which is where he attended high school. In school he was a dedicated baseball player, and the game remained a major preoccupation throughout his life. But art was already his focus. The family summered on Cape Cod, where his father worked as a sewing machine salesman and Hibbard where gave the first showings of his own work in a Baptist church.
Following high school graduation in 1906, Hibbard entered the Massachusetts State Normal Art School, Boston, where he worked under Joseph Rodefer DeCamp and Ernest L. Major. He moved on in 1910 to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, studying under Edmund C. Tarbell and Frank Benson. Upon graduation in 1913 he was awarded the Paige Traveling Scholarship, meant to finance two years in Europe. He left in the early autumn. His first stop was London. Next he was in Paris, and by December he was in Madrid. In each city he was most attentive to the great museum collections and other opportunities to study European works. He warmed especially to the French Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, whose work he already knew and admired from the holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A visit with Joaquin Sorolla in his Madrid studio made the strongest impression, however.
By January 1914 Hibbard was in the Spanish mountains, having his first experience of painting in a heavy snowfall. Although he moved on to Italy, his European sojourn was cut nearly in half by the outbreak of World War I that summer. He returned to the Boston area before the end of the year.
Hibbard became a painter of the New England countryside, immediately focusing on winter scenes. As early as 1915, he began to live much of the winter in the area of Jamaica, Vermont, although he maintained a studio in Belmont, a suburb of Boston, or in Boston itself, until 1930. Professional recognition came fairly quickly. Hibbard's first major exhibition was held in Falmouth in the summer of 1916. He had a one-man show at the Boston Art Club the same year. The Guild of Boston Artists showed his paintings in 1918. In 1920 he received first prize in the Duxbury (Massachusetts) Art Association annual. At the National Academy of Design, where he was consistently represented in annual exhibitions starting in 1915, he was awarded the Julius Hallgarten Prize in 1922. The following year he received the Jennie Sesnan Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, to whose annual exhibitions he was a regular contributor beginning in 1917. He received the Benjamin Altman Prize in the National Academy annuals of 1928 and 1931.
Hibbard is particularly remembered for his vital role in forming the artists' colony in Rockport, Massachusetts. Although a few artists had gravitated to that seaside town before Hibbard's arrival in 1920, the launching that same summer of his Rockport Summer School of Painting confirmed the town's identity as an artistic center. (Hibbard directed the school until the 1950s.) In 1921 the summer artist-residents met in his studio to form the Rockport Art Association. Initially Hibbard was secretary of the association; in 1926 he became its president, a position he retained until 1943. He helped lead the move to incorporate in 1928 and, two years later, to purchase a historic building in the town center that became the association's headquarters.
In 1974 the Hibbard family established the Aldo Hibbard Prize at the National Academy of Design. As required by the terms of the gift, the prize was given over the following five years for deserving paintings in the Academy's annual exhibitions.
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