Eagle’s Nest Art Gallery

The Eagle’s Nest Art Colony

Founded by sculptor Lorado Taft in 1898, the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony included painters sculptors, poets, storytellers, and musicians. The group took its name from an ancient cedar tree–a site for nesting eagles. Mostly consisting of artists from the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago, the group took creative refuge in Oregon, Illinois, at first setting up primitive tents in the summers, on bluffs near the Rock River. Later, the artists leased fifteen acres of land from Wallace Heckman for $ 1 per year and the promise to give lectures and workshops to the local community. The land provided space for eventual cottages and art studios. The artists gathered annually in a costumed promenade for a ceremonial paying of the rent.

The Eagle’s Nest Art Colony’s intimate, idyllic setting promoted creative cross-pollination between artist working in various mediums and genres, including sculpture, painting, watercolor, music, poetry, play writing, and theatrical productions. Eagle’s Nest member Maurice Maeterlinck’s tragic drama Les Aveugles (The Blind) inspired Taft’s sculptural grouping, The Blind, an allegorical treatment of the figure of the child as the visionary. The working plaster cast for The Blind, on permanent display in the Eagle’s Nest Art Gallery, was instrumental in the restoration of the large-scale title piece, cast in bronze and installed at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana campus in the Krannert Art Museum.

To dive deeper into the history of the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony and learn why the Rock River Valley appealed to artists see The Art of Oregon–by Beth Baker Simeone.