A member of the National Academy of Design since 1972, John Joseph Coughlin Jr. of Wellfleet, whose work graced the Golden Cod Gallery on East Commercial Street for decades, died at Seashore Point in Provincetown after a brief illness on Feb. 26, 2025. He was 93.
The son of John J. Coughlin (“Big Jack”) and Gabriel Teresa Jones Coughlin, Jack was born on Feb. 19, 1932 in Greenwich, Conn. As a child, Jack’s two great loves were drawing and animals. He often spoke of his parents buying his first art supplies after he filled the endpapers of their books with drawings.
Jack spent his high school years in Swansea and Fall River. In the early 1950s, he studied at the Art Students League in New York, then at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1953 with a B.F.A. in illustration. He was drafted into the Army in 1954.
Serving in Hawaii and Japan, Jack illustrated propaganda leaflets. Upon his discharge, he returned to RISD for an M.F.A. in printmaking. There he met Joan Hopkins of Wellfleet, who had grown up in Jamaica. They married right after her graduation in 1958.
Jack was hired at UMass Amherst in 1957 to illustrate university publications; he also did freelance work for popular crime fiction before returning to RISD to study printmaking with Herbert Lewis Fink. He completed his M.F.A. in 1961.
He became an assistant professor in the new Fine Arts Dept. at UMass in 1960, the same year his parents purchased a house by the Sawmill River in Montague. They lived on the ground floor after their retirement, and Jack and his family settled in on the second floor. For the next 35 years, he taught printmaking and drawing and inspired generations of artists and art teachers.
As a printmaker, Jack first worked in lithography, then etching and woodcuts, but few of his pre-1962 prints survive because of a devastating fire in his studio that year. The print shop-studio in the rebuilt house became the heart of his career for the next six decades.
In 1964, Jack and Joan rented and later bought the Golden Cod Gallery in Wellfleet, where their artwork is still on view in the summer.
In 1965, Jack and Joan traveled through Europe by car. In addition to visiting old master print collections and art museums, Jack encountered animals in the newly opened Basel Zoo that would later appear in many of his hybrid and metamorphic prints.
On that trip, Jack met Liam Miller, the publisher of the Dolmen Press, who introduced him to the art world in Dublin. Up through the 1990s, Jack regularly exhibited at the David Hendriks Gallery. He was a member of the Dublin Arts Club, and he forged friendships with printmakers including John Kelly and Alice Hanratty at the National College of Art and Design.
Through his Irish connections, he met his literary hero, Samuel Beckett, in Paris in 1986. Jack made multiple portraits of Beckett and several other modern Irish writers. He later turned to portraits of classical, jazz, and blues musicians.
The New Republic commissioned dozens of his portraits over the years, and his prints are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Boston Public Library.
Throughout his career, working from life and teaching life drawing informed his representations of the human figure. Wild animals, especially owls, rhinos, and elephants, in addition to his own dogs and cats, engaged him across mediums, his human and animal figures merging in metamorphic, hybrid, and sometimes humorous forms that evoke surrealist dream worlds and old master compositions.
Jack loved swimming, boating, and fishing. He had a large circle of friends, a rich social life, and 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 longtime member of the Beachcombers in Provincetown, where his friends Arthur Cohen and Mischa Richter 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, he 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.
Jack is survived by his wife, Joan Hopkins Coughlin of Wellfleet; his daughters, Molly Baring-Gould of Newton and Maura Coughlin of Eastham; his grandchildren Eben, Lucia, and Caleb Baring-Gould of Newton and Elliot Shafnacker of Eastham; and sons-in-law Toby Everett of Eastham and Dave Judge of Newton.
A memorial gathering at the Golden Cod Gallery in Wellfleet is being planned for the spring or early summer.
In lieu of flowers, memorial donations in Jack Coughlin’s name may be made to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the MSPCA at mspca.org, or the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, Kenya at reteti.org.
