Goon T. Chan

1893 - 1951

Sculptor Goon T. Chan was born in Taishan, a city on China’s southern coast, in 1893. At the age of 13, he left home for Montreal, Canada, to study English and medicine. In 1917, Chan enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. During his nearly 12-year stint at the school, he studied drawing under Philip Leslie Hale (brother of Ellen Day Hale) and eventually sculpture under Charles Grafly, who also counted Katharine Lane Weems, Walker Hancock and George Demetrios among his students during the 1920s. Grafly introduced Chan to Cape Ann, where the young artist subsequently acquired a small house on Rockport’s Bearskin Neck that he used as a studio, dubbing it “Gulls Perch.”

Chan left Cape Ann after graduating from the School of the MFA Boston in 1928. He continued his studies first in Paris and then Florence. In 1931 he married an Italian woman and the couple set sail for his hometown of Taishan. Chan remained in China until his death in 1951, and despite being intermittently displaced over the course of two tumultuous decades that saw an ongoing civil war, a war with Japan, the Second World War, and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, Chan never turned away from sculpture. As a noted portraitist, he published a catalogue of his work in 1940 and won numerous prizes and prestigious commissions in his home country.

The Cape Ann Museum has one example of Goon T. Chan’s work in its collection, a horned wooden dragon carved in deep relief surrounded by billowing swirls of smoke.