Rochefort-en-terre artist colony

DEFINITION

Located in the French medieval Brittany village of Rochefort-en-Terre, the colony was established around 1905 by Alfred Partridge Klots, Baltimore portrait painter, and his wife, Agnes. They built a chateau on the site of an earlier one that had been destroyed during the French Revolution, and this building became their home and his studio and the center of activity for resident artists. Trafford Klots, their son and an artist, spent much of his career there, and he and his wife, Isabel, activated the colony after World War II. After her husband's death in 1976, Isabel established the Alfred & Trafford Klots Artist Residency Program in memory of her husband and father-in-law, and in the late 1980s that program was taken over by the Maryland Institute College of Art. Source: Maryland Historical Society, www.mdhs.org/library/mss/ms002404.html; AskART biograhies. (LPD)