PORT TOWNSEND — “Thomas T. Wilson: The Best-Known Unknown Artist in the Northwest,” a new art exhibition, opens at the Jefferson Museum of Art & History this Saturday, bringing to light works rarely displayed in public.

The show will stay on display until August, giving art lovers a chance to see paintings from the Jefferson County Historical Society collection and from private homes across the region.

Painter Tom Wilson, who arrived in Port Townsend in 1960, was one of the people who shaped it into an arts community, said Bill Tennent, executive director of the historical society.

The Jefferson Museum of Art & History is inside Port Townsend’s historic City Hall, 540 Water St., and is open daily from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Admission is $4 for adults and $1 for children age 3 to 12, except for the first Saturday of each month, when visiting is free. Jefferson County Historical Society members always enjoy free admission.

Raised on a farm in central Illinois, Wilson came west to earn a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Oregon.

Freer in the west

There, he experienced a freer feeling, according to Mary Coney, an admirer of Wilson’s paintings and a former president of the Seattle Arts Alliance.

Wilson’s art celebrated Port Townsend’s streets, buildings, gardens and trees, as well as the light on Discovery Bay.

He also became a teacher, establishing the Port Townsend Summer School of the Arts, a precursor to the Centrum foundation.

To make ends meet, Wilson taught watercolor classes and bartered his paintings, often portraits of Port Townsend locals, in exchange for life’s necessities.

The artist “took to Port Townsend as if it were extended family,” wrote the late Peter Simpson in the book Thomas T. Wilson: Paintings, on University of Washington Press.

For information about Wilson’s show and other museum offerings, see www.JCHSmuseum.org or phone 360-385-1003.

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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.