John Joseph “Jack” Coughlin Jr., resident of Wellfleet, died at Seashore Pointe in Provincetown on Feb. 26, 2025 after a brief illness, several days after his 93rd birthday.
Born in 1932 in Greenwich Connecticut, Jack spent his high school years in Swansea and Fall River, Mass. although his family had moved several times up and down the East Coast during the Depression. His father, John J. Coughlin Sr., aka “Big Jack” grew up in Bristol RI in an Irish-American family. His mother, Gabriel Teresa Jones Coughlin was a talented pianist whose father was an English tailor working in New York, and her mother was a recent French immigrant. As a child his two great loves were drawing and animals. He often recounted his parents buying his first art supplies after he filled the end papers of their books with drawings. In the early 1950s, Jack studied at the Art Students League in New York, then at the Rhode Island School of Design. He graduated in 1953 with a BFA in illustration and spent time in Greenwich Village before being drafted in the fall of 1954. He served in the army from 1954-56 and was stationed in Hawaii and Japan where he did illustration work for propaganda leaflets. After the war, he returned to RISD and began his MFA in printmaking where he met Joan Hopkins, who was an undergraduate illustration major at the time. Her family was from Wellfleet, but she had grown up in Jamaica. They married right after her graduation from RISD in 1958.
Jack was hired at UMass Amherst in 1957 as an illustrator of university publications and he also did freelance illustration for popular crime fiction. Jack soon returned to RISD to complete his MFA in printmaking with Herbert Lewis Fink. He was hired as an Assistant Professor in the newly established Fine Arts Department at UMass in 1960 where for the next 35 years, taught printmaking and drawing and inspired generations of artists and art teachers. As a printmaker, he first worked in lithography, then etching and woodcut, but few of his prints made prior to 1962 survived, as a devastating fire that began in his studio damaged their house in Montague that year. His parents had purchased the house in 1960 and they retired there, living on the ground floor while Jack and family lived upstairs. His print shop-studio in the rebuilt red wooden house by the Sawmill River was at the heart of his artistic career for the next six decades.
In 1964, Jack and Joan first rented and later owned the Golden Cod Gallery on East Commercial Street in Wellfleet where their artwork is still on view in the summer. The historic building had served as a blacksmith’s shop and as an early site of Hatch’s Fish Market before it was purchased by the Watsons, who opened and named the gallery and who sold it to Jack and Joan.
In the summer of 1965 Jack and Joan travelled Europe by car, picking up a VW Beetle in Amsterdam that they shipped home at the end of their trip. Several formative experiences on this trip set Jack on the course of his artistic career. In addition to visiting old master print collections and art museums, Jack encountered animals in the newly opened Basel zoo that would feature in many of his hybrid and metamorphic prints. On that trip in Dublin, Jack met Liam Miller, the publisher of the Dolmen Press who introduced him to much of the art world in Dublin. Up through the 1990s, Jack regularly exhibited in Dublin at the David Hendriks Gallery, was a member of the Dublin Arts Club, and forged close friendships with printmakers at the National College of Art and Design such as John Kelly and Alice Hanratty. Through his Irish connections, he met his literary hero Samuel Beckett in Paris in 1986. In different mediums, Jack made many portraits of Beckett and many other modern Irish writers, skills he later turned to portraits of classical, jazz and blues musicians.
He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1972. During his decades of teaching drawing and printmaking, Jack continued to work as an artist and illustrator, producing countless editions of lithographs, etchings and woodcuts; The New Republic magazine commissioned dozens of his portraits over the years. His printmaking was internationally recognized and collected by the Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, the Boston Public Library, among other museum, university and library collections. Throughout his career, working from life and teaching life drawing informed his representations of the human figure. Wild animals, especially owls, rhinos and elephants were sources of endless fascination across mediums. In his most imaginative work, human and animal figures merge in metamorphic, hybrid, sometimes humorous forms that evoke surrealist dream worlds and old master compositions. His many drawings and caricatures also attest to his great love for the cats and the dogs in his life.
Jack was always active outside in the summer in Wellfleet; he loved swimming, boating and fishing. He had a large circle of friends and a rich social life. He had a great love of good food, music and literature. In his 60s he rediscovered playing the harmonica, and as his love for the blues grew, he occasionally took to the stage with local blues groups. He was a long time member of the Beachcomber’s club in Provincetown where his dear friends Arthur Cohen, Misha Richter and others were regulars. Jack taught occasional drawing classes at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and the Provincetown Art Association. In the summer of 2022, Jack had a major retrospective at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, curated by his daughter Maura. Although at the end of his life his world grew much smaller, he never lost his fascination with faces and animals. At the end of December 2024, he photographed his grandson Eben because he wanted to draw him.
His surviving family members include his wife Joan Hopkins Coughlin, his daughters Molly and Maura Coughlin, his grandchildren Eben, Lucia and Caleb Baring-Gould and Elliot Shafnacker and sons-in-law Toby Everett and Dave Judge. A memorial gathering at the Golden Cod Gallery will be planned for later in the spring or early summer in Wellfleet. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations in Jack Coughlin’s name may be made to the Provincetown Art Association Museum, the MSPCA or the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, Kenya.