early as the 1860s, when illustrators Harry Fenn and Charles Parsons commuted by rail to their New York City studios, just as Inness and others did in the decades that followed. They were year-round resident-commuters and varied in their stylistic approaches, unlike the impressionists that abandoned city life to gather for the summer in the "art colonies" at the end of the 19th century in Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, and New Hope, Pennsylvania. Charles Eaton painted in a style much like that of Inness and Frederick Judd Waugh devoted himself to seascapes, while painter Henry Rankin Poore preferred a "workaday realism " in subject and texture of brushwork and his colleague Frederick Ballard Williams adopted a "more rough-hewn and turbulent form". Walter and Emilie Greenough worked as stained-glass designers in the studio of John LaFarge, who lived in Montclair for a time as well. Sculptors included Jonathan Scott Hartley, Inness's son-in-law, and William Couper. The town created a Village Improvement Society in 1878, superseded by a Municipal Art Commission in 1908, to beautify Montclair and preserve the charm of a country town. The Commission's head was William T. Evans, an Irish immigrant dry-goods magnate who had acquired the Inness estate in 1900. Between the early 1880s and 1913, Evans amassed a collection of more than 800 American paintings, by far the largest collection of American art before World War I. In 1907, he donated several dozen works to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. (named "National Gallery of Art" at that time), and grew that number to 160 by the time of his death in 1918. In 1909, Evans offered to donate 26 oil paintings to the town of Montclair on condition that it provide a fireproof gallery space to house and display them. The proposal was defeated in a referendum in 1910. In response to that rejection, on December 8, 1910, the Municipal Art Commission transformed itself into the Montclair Art Association and proposed to create and manage an art gallery without government support. Raising funds still proved difficult until another Montclair resident, Florence Rand Lang (1861–1943), agreed to bear most of the expense and her gift of $50,000, much of it for the purchase of the site, transformed the project from a gallery into a museum. She had arrived in Montclair from Massachusetts as a teenager in 1873. Her initial donation was the first