Chaffee-1978.Pa09

Oliver Newberry Chaffee studied with Charles Hawthorne, first at the Art Students League in New York and then at the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown.  Although Chaffee spent much of his time in Paris prior to World War I and throughout the 1920’s he always returned to Provincetown.  Chaffee helped found the Provincetown Art Association in 1914.  As an artist his ambition was to form a union between the abstract and the real believing that  “abstraction to be profoundly impressive, must be anchored in the consciousness of the exterior world.”