Vera Andrus (1896–1979)

Vera Andrus was born in Wisconsin and studied at the Minnesota School of Architecture and the Minnesota Institute of Art. By the 1930s, she was enrolled at the Art Students League in New York and had discovered lithography, an art she would pursue for 40 years.

During the 1930s, Andrus began summering on Cape Ann, having heard what she called “glowing reports” about the area from artist friends. By the 1940s she had a summer studio on Rocky Neck and was immersed in her surroundings. Of the wharves surrounding Gloucester Harbor, she would later write, “they were dangerous; they were dirty; they were lovely.” In 1958, she took up year round residence in Rockport.

Throughout her life, Andrus maintained a strong interest in architecture. Writing in the North Shore magazine in 1976, she took special note of all the changes that had taken place in central Gloucester in the years since she first began frequenting the area. She was particularly taken with many of the improvements that came to fruition in the wake of Urban Renewal including a new pedestrian mall linking Main Street to Middle Street through the Co-Operative Bank, handsome additions to the Cape Ann Museum and the Sawyer Free Library, and the clearing of blighted buildings from around the Fitz H. Lane House on Duncan’s Point. She was not, however, enamored with all the changes taking place around her and lamented the loss of “the picturesque old wharves, fish house and sail lofts which used to line the harbor” and provide subject matter for many of her lithographs.