Aldro Hibbard grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and was trained at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, under Joseph Decamp, and at the Boston Museum School, under Edmund Tarbell. He traveled through Europe in 1913 and 1914. Several exhibitions in Boston after his return established his reputation, and he began annual sojourns to the mountains and the shore. Vermont and Rockport, Massachusetts, as Hibbard's principal painting locations, constituted a "complete" New England, at least for those who purchased his work from 1915 through 1965. As one might expect, spending winters in Jamaica, Vermont, he specialized in snow scenes, featuring activities such as logging and maple sugar gathering. He discovered Rockport in 1919, not long after he had begun painting in Vermont. He established a summer school there, which quickly grew into a Rockport institution. For the next thirty years he taught artists and amateurs alike to see the Massachusetts coast as a familiar, old-fashioned place—as quintessentially New England as snow-covered Vermont.

William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, editors, with contributions by Dona Brown, Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Judith K. Maxwell, Stephen Nissenbaum, Bruce Robertson, Roger B. Stein, and William H. Truettner Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (Washington, D.C.; New Haven, Conn; and London: National Museum of American Art with Yale University Press, 1999)