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The Tile Club was the first hip group to come to the Hamptons. They were cool, clever, outrageous, artistic and inspired. Not to mention trendsetters on the cutting edge. They made their collective trip to East Hampton in the summer of 1878.
A group of artists and intellectuals that at various times included Winslow Homer and William Merritt Chase, they enjoyed subversive humor, code names, pranks and obscure satire. The Tile Club was limited to twelve self described “studiously slangy and Bohemian” members, and their concept of painting tiles was both a reference to the aesthetic movement then popular in Great Britain and a send-up of the unrestrained and often uncritical contemporary American craze for decorative objects.
They came up with the idea of a summer sketching trip to Long Island, partly because one of the members, a journalist who was responsible for promoting tourism on the Long Island Railroad, could get them free passage; partly because they hoped to sell an article to some “grasping publisher;” partly because they wanted to sketch and paint outdoors, something most of them had never done; and mostly for the sheer fun of it all.
They left, as people still do, from the Hunter’s Point terminus on a train to Babylon. Lacking the convenience of the Robert Moses Causeway, they then caught a boat to Captree Island in the Great South Bay, and after a day of sketching proceeded to the rural and picturesque Lake Ronkonkama, where they went boating by moonlight. Next they went by rail and stagecoach to Bridgehampton. Charles Reinhart did a sketch titled The Tile Club and the Milliner of Bridgehampton, showing the group buying ribbons to adorn big brimmed straw hats they had bought in Sayville.
Now beribboned and stylishly outfitted, they went on to East Hampton for some extensive plein-air sketching and painting. Girl on Beach, East Hampton, a painted and glazed tile by Arthur Quartley, is the East Hampton Library collection. But they also carried on and had fun, lampooning John Howard Payne, the East Hampton author of the celebrated song, Home Sweet Home. It was lighthearted fun, and in what must have been a jaunty ensemble performance, they even sang it for the locals.
The travelers continued east to Montauk, and after that journeyed to Shelter Island, where they quite enjoyed staying for the first time on the trip in a smart hotel. They returned to New York by way of the North Fork.
The following February, Scribner’s Monthly published “The Tile Club at Play,” an account of the journey along with 27 illustrations, a few of which might loosely be considered the first party pictures of the Hamptons. William Laffan, the railroad employee, published The New Long Island: A Handbook for Summer Travel, a promotional booklet that used some of the same illustrations. The LIRR was considerably more innovative then and offered a year of free travel to those people who moved to Long Island.
What would the Tilers, as they called themselves, think of the Hamptons now? My guess is that they would get it, that even though the times and the styles are vastly different, human desires have not changed that much. The Tile Club was an adventurous, sybaritic, joyful group—they were downtown hipsters after all—and the first of many lively generations to venture to the Hamptons in search of beauty, revelry and laughter.