Morris Hall Pancoast was a Pennsylvania-trained American Impressionist whose long working life produced one of the most consistent bodies of New England coastal landscape painting of the early twentieth century — Gloucester, Rockport, and the Cape Ann shore in winter, summer, and the changing weather of the working New England fishing towns.
Morris Hall Pancoast (April 27, 1877 – 1963) was an American Impressionist painter, illustrator, and cartoonist, born in Salem, New Jersey. He trained in night courses at Drexel University and enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1897, where he studied under Thomas Anshutz, and continued his training in Paris at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens between 1902 and 1905. After returning to the United States he settled near Anshutz in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, and supported himself for more than a decade as a working newspaper artist — first in the art department of the Philadelphia Inquirer and then as a cartoonist for the Philadelphia North American — before committing himself fully to easel painting.
His mature work concentrated on the New England coast, particularly the Cape Ann fishing villages of Gloucester and Rockport, Massachusetts, where he and his wife spent their summers running her "Studio Gallery by the Sea" while maintaining a New York City studio in the winters. He exhibited regularly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1911 through 1934, was awarded its Gold Medal in 1924, and his paintings entered the Academy's collection — including The Pennsy Train Shed (c. 1917) — and the holdings of other regional institutions.