Known for his scenes of Provincetown, Massachusetts and surrounding area, especially atmospheric seascapes, PHILIP MALICOAT (1908 – 1981) settled in Provincetown, where he had first gone as a student of Charles Hawthorne with whom he had first studied at the John Herron Institute in Indianapolis. 

Accoarding to Malicoat, Hawthorne had a big reputation and came to the Herron Institute on one of his many tours around the country to give demonstration classes. He was a very positive, encouraging and upbeat teacher and demanding but not overtly demanding. Malicoat then painted with him at Provincetown. Of this experience, he said: “You always came out of his class wanting to get right going again, because there was plenty of room to get better. Besides, on the weekend we usually scrapped down our old canvases that we used all week and repaint them, so we’d be ready for Monday.” Students of Hawthorne were a big part of the population there. “You could go down the street in the evenings before the summer was over and know practically everybody. There weren’t many tourists in town.”

There were older, established artists there, and Malicoat spent his first winter in Provincetown in 1931. He was a member of the Beachcombers, a social group where he hobnobbed with the other artists including Gerrit Beneker, Edwin Dickinson, William Paxton, Karl Knaths, Ross Moffett, and Coulton and Frederick Waugh.

Malicoat was born in Indianapolis and there attended the John Herron Art Institute from 1928 to 1929. Following that period, he studied at Provincetown with Charles Hawthorne and also Henry Hensche at their Cape Cod School of Art and, staying on, became a trustee of the Provincetown Art Association. 

He was also active at Woodstock, New York, and exhibited with the Woodstock Art Association. Other exhibition venues included the Corcoran Gallery, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Early in his career, he painted in both watercolor and oil, but from the 1950s, used only oil paint.