What was the St. Genevieve art colony?

two St. Louis artists, Aimee Schweig and Jessie Beard Rickly, rented the Mammy Shaw House across the street from the Felix Vallé House in Ste. Genevieve. The pair had spent several previous summers at an artists’ colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they studied with painter Charles Hawthorne of the Cape Cod that one reason was the Depression. The other was “a conviction that there were enough things worth painting in the Middle West, particularly at Ste. Genevieve, to make it worthwhile.”