Omer Thomas Lassonde (1903–1980), a New Hampshire-born painter celebrated for his versatility across realism, cubism, expressionism, and abstraction, spent much of his adult life rooted in the small town of Boscawen, New Hampshire. Though his career carried him across continents—from the ateliers of Paris to the shores of West Samoa—it was Boscawen that served as his home base, his sanctuary, and ultimately the site of his most enduring legacy.
Lassonde was born in 1903 in the Penacook section of Concord, and though his childhood was split between Concord and Boscawen, it was in the latter town that he would eventually settle as a mature artist. He acquired the historic house at 150 King Street in Boscawen, built around 1769, once home to clock-mechanism inventor Benjamin Morrill. Lassonde called the property "Fort Acres," and there he established a studio, living and working among the town's oldest walls even as his art reached international audiences.
The 1940 U.S. Census placed Lassonde in Boscawen along the Daniel Webster Highway, where he was recorded as the state supervisor of the New Hampshire Art Project—a role that placed him at the center of the state's Depression-era arts infrastructure. From 1935 to 1943, he directed the New Hampshire Federal Arts Program under the Works Progress Administration. The program was established in December 1935, initially working out of temporary headquarters in Concord before moving to a permanent home in Manchester. Under Lassonde's supervision, the project staged more than forty exhibitions across the state and employed roughly twenty artists, who produced everything from large-scale public murals and sculptures to smaller, portable works that toured in group shows around New Hampshire. Beyond exhibitions, Lassonde also oversaw the restoration of murals in the New Hampshire House and directed the state's contribution to the national Index of American Design, a federal project cataloguing American decorative and folk art. Much of this administrative work was coordinated from his Boscawen home, even as the position required him to travel regularly to Manchester and Concord.
Boscawen was also where Lassonde built his domestic life. After marrying Louisa Ward Tompkins, a jewelry maker and weaver, in 1937, the couple made the King Street house their shared home, traveling extensively but always returning to Boscawen between journeys. Neighbors and townspeople recalled Lassonde's generosity: family accounts describe him inviting local craftsmen into his home and rewarding their help with original paintings, a gesture that reflected the close, small-town relationships he maintained even as his artistic reputation grew nationally and abroad.
It was from this Boscawen base that Lassonde helped found the New Hampshire Art Association in 1940. He was one of several founders, alongside artists including William Holst and photographer Lotte Jacobi, with painter Paul Sample serving as the association's first honorary president. The organization was conceived as a vehicle for promoting New Hampshire's working artists and giving them a shared institutional voice, and Lassonde remained closely tied to it for the rest of his life. That connection deepened after his death: the Association has held an annual juried exhibition in his name, the Omer T. Lassonde Memorial Exhibition, in every year since, showcasing recent work across painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and photography.
The fate of the King Street house reflects how thoroughly Lassonde's identity became entwined with the Association he helped build. Known during his lifetime as "Fort Acres," the roughly 1769 colonial home was, upon Lassonde's death in December 1980, donated by his widow Louisa to the New Hampshire Art Association, along with many of his paintings. The Association used the property as its headquarters for a period afterward, but financial realities eventually intervened: many of the donated paintings were sold off to generate operating income, and the house itself was later sold out of the Association's hands entirely. It passed into private ownership under a new name, the Robie-Morrill House, a designation honoring its colonial-era builders rather than its twentieth-century artist-resident. Despite the sale, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, a recognition that preserved its physical legacy even as its ownership moved on from the Lassonde family and the institution he founded.
In many ways, Boscawen represented the anchor point of a restless creative life. While critics and journalists praised Lassonde for putting New Hampshire "on the map artistically," it was within the quiet, colonial confines of his Boscawen studio that much of that reputation was built, sustained, and ultimately memorialized. The town remains inseparable from his story, preserving both the physical house he inhabited and the memory of the man who filled it with color.
