The Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit, Mass., is housed in a 1775 Georgian Colonial house.

NYT / Ellen Albanese

COTUIT, Mass. — The whimsical paintings of Ralph and Martha Cahoon, filled with sailors, ships, lighthouses and mermaids, would be reason enough to visit the Cahoon Museum of American Art. But the collection also contains some masterpieces of marine painting, tonalism, impressionism and folk art.

In the 1930s the Cahoons established a business in Osterville selling and decorating furniture, using a technique called “rosemaling” that Martha had learned from her Swedish father. When a customer suggested that their furniture designs would work well as framed art, a new career began. They painted on masonite, a hard surface that was similar to the wood they were used to.

Mermaids became the trademark of Ralph Cahoon, who died in 1982. Their dainty breasts exposed and lower quarters curled into a decorative scroll, Cahoon’s mermaids knit, golf, fish, cook, pick apples and fly kites. In Megansett Tea Room pearl-draped mermaids sip from teacups at one table, poodles at their feet, while their colleagues at another table play cards. Bon Appetit depicts four mermaids in a well-stocked kitchen busily preparing a meal; the one emptying a bottle of wine into a large pot looks suspiciously like Julia Child.

Martha Cahoon, who died in 1999, placed her role as wife and mother above that of artist. She chose a more pastel palette and often focused on themes of childhood and family. Her work feels more nostalgic than whimsical.

The Cahoons’ work fills one room of the 1775 Georgian Colonial that was the artists’ home, studio, and gallery for nearly 40 years. Their stenciling decorates walls and floors. One advantage of displaying art in such a setting, said director Robert L. Gambone, is that the spaces are intimate.

Among the masterpieces of the collection, Gambone said, are ship portraits by James E. Buttersworth, a major marine painter; American folk painter Levi Wells Prentice’s Bushels of Apples Under a Tree; and the rosy, luminous Sunset in the Arctic by William Bradford, a pioneering 19th-century landscape painter. The frames are nearly as intricate as the paintings.

American impressionists represented include John J. Enneking, best known for autumn sunsets, and David Ericson, a student of James McNeill Whistler. Ericson’s Twilight Pilgrim Tower Provincetown is an atmospheric, almost abstract view of Provincetown Harbor in pinks, lavenders and blues.

The museum mounts six to eight special exhibitions a year, an extraordinary number considering its size, and all are created in-house, Gambone said. This year’s shows have focused on food, contemporary ceramics, the Provincetown paintings of Frank Milby, vintage photographs, 19th-century genre painting, and a show illustrating America’s ethnic diversity, featuring artists of American Indian, African, Latin, Asian and European heritage.

The current exhibition, through Dec. 30, is the art of contemporary New Hampshire oil painter Colin Berry, paintings that “feature a magic realism prompting for the discerning eye all manner of questions about the role of art, illusion, realism, repersentation, beauty, and aesthetics,” in Gambone’s words.

“We take seriously our mission to present a variety of art to the public, particularly the Cape Cod public,” Gambone said. “While we’re best known for our Cahoon collection, our aspiration is to grow our reputation as a good, strong regional museum of American art.”If you go . . .

FROM PROVIDENCE:

Take I-195 East to Mass. Exit 22A (Route 25 toward Cape Cod). After 10 miles, Route 25 becomes Route 28 South. Stay on that across the Bourne Bridge and through two roundabouts, then take the exit for Route 151 East (toward Maspee/Hyannis). Take a slight right onto151 East (Nathan Ellis Highway), and at the next roundabout take the third exit onto Falmouth Road (Route 28). Follow to the Cahoon Museum of American Art, 4676 Falmouth Rd.

HOURS:

Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sunday 1-4 p.m. Docent tours Fridays at 11 a.m. Closed Mondays and month of January. Adults $5, seniors and students $4, children under 12 free.

MORE INFORMATION:

Call (508) 428-7581. (The website, www.cahoonmuseum.org, was a work in progress as of last week.)