This winter, I had the pleasure of being back in my home country, and attending two fantastic exhibits put on by Masterworks Bermuda and the Bermuda National Gallery. These showings in Bermuda present a compelling opportunity to reflect on colour, light and place through two thoughtful exhibitions at the island’s major art institutions. At the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art in Paget, ‘Janet Fish: Place in Time’ delivers the first ever comprehensive exhibition in Bermuda of the celebrated American painter’s work, foregrounding her extraordinary contribution to contemporary still life and the formative influence of her Bermudian upbringing. Across the sparkling harbour in Hamilton, the Bermuda National Gallery’s ‘A Study in Light & Colour’ resurrects an earlier era of artistic engagement with the island, offering selections from its historically significant David L. White Collection of American Impressionist works. Viewed together, the two exhibitions create a layered dialogue about the visual language of light and colour across generations.
‘Janet Fish: Place in Time’ presents a major retrospective survey of Fish’s work spanning five decades, marking her first solo exhibition in the country where she spent her formative years. Born in 1938 and raised in Bermuda from age ten until her graduation from Bermuda High School for Girls in 1956, Fish’s early encounters with tropical light, brilliant colours and the rhythm of island life helped shape the visual sensibility that would define her career. Her family possessed a fruitful artistic lineage, her grandfather was American Impressionist, Clark Greenwood Voorhees, and her mother, Florence Whistler Fish, was also a painter and sculptor. These influences situated her within a continuum of artistic exploration that bridged Bermuda and the broader American art scene. The exhibition emphasises how these personal and environmental experiences informed her distinctive approach to still life, which combined meticulous attention to surface, light, transparency and layered compositions.
Organised across the Masterworks Butterfield and Mezzanine Galleries, ‘Place in Time’ immerses the visitor in Fish’s richly coloured canvases, many of which feature dense, layered arrangements of objects, colourful textiles, tropical fruits, flowers and shells, that exude both visual energy and spatial complexity. The exhibition foregrounds the interplay between Fish’s memories of Bermuda and her mature artistic practice, inviting viewers to consider how the island’s dense light and layered environment reappear across her compositions. This connection between place and picture plane becomes especially compelling in works where tropical surfaces catch, reflect and refract light, creating dynamic resonances that seem to echo Bermuda’s chromatic landscape even decades after she left the island to study and work in the United States.
The presence of archival materials and objects associated with Fish’s personal history further deepens the narrative arc of the show, allowing visitors to trace the influence of her Bermudian upbringing not as mere anecdote but as an integral part of her creative vision. The curatorial framing by Melissa Messina and Dr Sara Thom situates the artist’s work within both personal biography and broader art historical conversations about still life, luminosity and abstraction, making clear why Fish’s paintings continue to resonate with audiences and artists alike. The inclusion of an accompanying catalogue enhances this context, offering critical essays that unpack Fish’s sustained engagement with material, light and perception across her long career.
In contrast, ‘A Study in Light & Colour’ at the Bermuda National Gallery reaches back into the early twentieth century to explore how American Impressionists interpreted Bermuda’s distinctive scenic and atmospheric conditions. Drawn from one of the gallery’s most important permanent holdings, the David L. White Collection, the exhibition selects 21 works, primarily oils and watercolours, that capture “open landscapes and languid sun-drenched days of life in old Bermuda.” Many of these artists, attracted by the island’s mild winters and its luminous quality of light, came from artist colonies in Provincetown, Cape Cod and Old Lyme, bringing with them techniques learned from French Impressionism and adapting them to Bermudian topography and climate.
Painted en plein air, these works register a slower rhythm of life and a pictorial language shaped by direct engagement with sunlight and environment. The warm glow of a late afternoon in Will Howe Foote’s ‘Old Bermuda House’ contrasts with the bright turquoise vibrancy of Stanley Pierpont’s ‘Bathers on Bermuda Beach’, illustrating a shared fascination with how colour and light interact in different contexts. Sea, sky and built environment emerge not as static backdrops but as dynamic partners in a visual narrative that rewards careful looking. The exhibition also offers moments of quiet respite, such as Clarence Scott White’s ‘St. George’s’, where soft shadows and sun-dappled streets evoke a contemplative sense of place anchored in everyday life.
While one show looks inward at the refined still life practice of a single artist, the other looks outward at a collective engagement with natural landscape and social memory, together offering a rich cross-section of Bermuda’s artistic relationships to light and colour. Both exhibitions prompt reflection not only on aesthetic qualities but on the ways art mediates experience and environment. At Masterworks, Fish’s vibrant compositions articulate an intimate, personal vision shaped by memory and memory’s colours. At BNG, the Impressionist selections open a window onto Bermuda’s visual and cultural history, inviting viewers to step into scenes that feel both venerable and familiar.
Ultimately, these exhibitions underscore the enduring potency of light and colour in shaping artistic imagination, whether through the passionate still lifes of a twentieth-century American artist rooted in island experience, or through the sun-filled views of artists who came to Bermuda a century ago and translated the island’s atmosphere into a language of brushstroke and hue. Each show, in its own way, deepens our appreciation for the manifold ways Bermudian light has inspired, challenged and enlivened artistic practice.
Edited by Saffron Watkins
Cover Image: Janet Fish photographed by Jay Stock, 2002.
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