The painter Robert Emmett Owen hailed from North Adams, Mass., the old mill town now home to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Yet MASS MoCA has never exhibited paintings by North Adams’s foremost native artist, born there in 1878. The artist, however, is now the subject of a 55-painting show called “The Road Less Traveled,” at the Spanierman Gallery.

Owen studied in New York, at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. After some time in Connecticut, Owen settled in New York City, where he operated the Robert Emmett Owen New England Landscape Gallery, first on Madison Avenue, then on West 57th Street, between 1920 and 1941 — which is to say, until well into the period when Hans Hofmann established himself as the city’s most influential teacher of painting.

Owen moved to New Rochelle in 1941, and it’s not hard to see how he may have felt alienated from a New York City art world where his kind of work — impressionism, basically — had fallen from favor. But for all Owen’s “conservatism” in holding to the line set down by Willard Leroy Metcalf and the Cos Cob painters — such as Leonard Ochtman, Owen’s teacher — he falls to that category of artists whose dogged pursuit of a vision lands them on the periphery, yet whose works may startle with subtle technique.

Owen, like N.C. Wyeth, studied at the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston, and flourished as a magazine illustrator. Looking at the paintings at Spanierman, it’s not hard to see why. The paintings exhibit a solid base of draftsmanship, and may at times seem almost to be book illustrations.

If you’ve ever known someone who grew up in Owen’s part of the world, you know how the countryside—woods, mountains, streams, falls, country roads, barns, and bridges — remain in his or her blood. You can take the boy out of the Berkshires, but you can’t take the Berkshires out of the boy. Owen recorded his beloved New England in every season and mood, with minute adjustments of technique that the viewer feels Owen never indulged for the sake of fashion or whimsy but only as means of eking just a tad more New Englandness from his subject.

Muted colors and indistinct light sources sometimes compromise Owen’s pictures. A close look at brushstrokes suggests that maybe thecolorshavedegeneratedsomewhat over time, though in general the problem seems to come from the basic difficulty of rendering light and color to appear in the gallery as they do in plein air. That said, the best of these pictures are very good indeed.

Some of the most dazzling pictures comprise arrangements of rusts and lavenders. In both cases, Owen varies the hues considerably, and the palette of rusts could come only from someone who had observed with the minutest attention the coloration of New England’s fall foliage. In paintings like “Vermont Landscape” and “Autumn Lane” (all Owen’s titles tend to the prosaic), daubs of the color may convey autumn trees and bold strokes may convey fiery light across a lavender mountain meadow. In one picture, “Road in Autumn,” a tree blazons its oranging branches as though it were the source of light itself — like a jack-o’-lantern.

His architectural pictures, like “Smith’s Covered Bridge,” “White Farmhouse,” “The Red Mill,” “Old Homestead,” “New England Winter,” and “First Congregational Church,” may form the best group of paintings in the show. The viewer can’t mistake Owen’s debt to Pissarro, but the architectural pictures show the influence of Cézanne, who painted buildings much as Owen did: the cubistic arrangement of building masses against a compressed perspective, or a flattened patterning of the foreground, serves to make the buildings appear one with the landscape. It’s an unorthodox rendering that serves to bring out a quality of feeling that might otherwise go unnoted. (“First Congregational Church” is also an homage to Constable.)

“New England Hamlet” shows Owen’s outstanding skill as a topographical painter, and made this writer yearn to see more that the artist may have done in that line — not least if he’d done any New York cityscapes, with their light so different from that of New England. (After all, Childe Hassam, who mastered New York’s light, also hailed from Massachusetts.) But the best picture may be “New England Winter,” with its snow patterned abstractly, in squares of pinks, yellows, and lavenders, calling to mind no one so much as Hans Hofmann.

My one complaint with the show is the too-vague dating of the pictures: All of them say “1910s-1920s” or “1910s-1930s.” We may only guess at Owen’s stylistic development.

Until September 1 (45 E. 58th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-832-0208).