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In his time, Edwin Otis Nielsen (1895-1970) was one Maine’s best known and popular sketch artists.
As a young man, he worked for various firms until he came up with the idea of sketching not only the exterior of churches, but also their interiors, all of which he made into prints, posters, stationery, and note cards that he sold to the churches who then sold them to parishioners and others as fund raisers. Over a four-year period, he sketched over 1,000 churches across the United States, He claimed he always got it right the first time; he never did a sketch over.
Edwin Otis Nielsen then branched out to other topics, saying that there was no better place as good as Maine to have subjects to sketch. Eventually, he and a friend, Linwood Wade, opened a business called Lion Craft in Portland where they shipped wholesale orders from and operated a retail store where they sold Nielsen’s artwork and the sketch books that he published.
Edwin Otis Nielsen, known as Hank to his friends, married Georgia Mary Cobb on November 15, 1916 and the couple had two children. Later in life, he lived in a two-flat that he and his wife shared with their son while he continued to do his artwork from a home studio.
He sketched a number of Maine’s lighthouses, including West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, the easternmost lighthouse on the mainland of the Atlantic Coast of the United States. If you can find one of the sketches, they make for great décor for any home or office.
This story appeared in the
Jul/Aug 2022 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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