The Cornish Colony Gallery and Museum, located on Maxfield Parish Highway in Cornish, celebrates the history and creativity of members of the original Cornish Colony. In 1998, the house called Mastlands, which was the epicentre of activity in the Colony, was purchased by Alma Gilbert for use as a venue to display Maxfield Parrish's work. She is considered to be one of the world's foremost experts in the work and life of his work.
The Cornish Art Colony was an extraordinary grouping of over seventy artists, playwrights, architects, landscape designers, writers, actors and patrons of the arts who built or purchased houses in the small neighboring towns of Plainfield and Cornish. New York lawyer Charles Beaman arrived first and eventually persuaded a number of friends to join him. In 1885 Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the first to arrive and was then followed by a group of artists and writers.
Other members included Maxfield Parrish, Thomas Dewing, Charles Platt and Kenyon Cox. In addition to visual artists, there were playwrights like Percy MacKaye, performers Isadora Duncan and Ethel Barrymore, and the novelist, Winston Churchill. For three years Cornish even served as the site of Woodrow Wilson's "Summer White House."
