Childe Hassam 1859-1935

Throughout his career, Childe Hassam found artistic inspiration in the Isle of Shoals, a group of rocky islands ten miles from the New-Hampshire-Maine coast. Hassam had first visited the islands as early as 1884, and returned there frequently for what he called 'working vacations' until 1916.  As David Park Curry notes, “Hassam’s summer sojourns on the Isles of Shoals [were] among the most fruitful of his long career” (Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited, Denver, 1990, p. 100). 

The American writer Harriet Prescott Spofford wrote in 1916, “Appledore and Haley’s, Cedar and Malagar [sic], White and Seavey’s, Star and Duck, Shag and Mingo Rocks. . .a few acres of trap and granite and a handful of soil, hurling the spray from one to another and breasting the whole force of the Atlantic surge, make up the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of Maine, where Celia Thaxter passed the greater part of her life, a life fed with the wild wonder of sea and sky and transfigured rock, the multitudinous phases of color, and the equally multitudinous phases of emotion"  (A Stern and Lovely Scene: A Visual History of the Isles of Shoals, Durham, New Hampshire, 1978, p. 11).  While Hassam focused his attention primarily on Appledore and Thaxter’s seaside garden, he also painted the rocky cliffs and wild, colorful vegetation of the other islands.  Star Island, the subject of the present watercolor, was home to a number of popular tourist sites.   The White Island Lighthouse, visible from the southern end of the Island and painted by Hassam in 1886 and the well-known Oceanic Hotel, all attracted visitors to Star Island. 

With its overlapping strokes of emerald and forest green and vibrant dabs of red, pink and yellow, Star Island, Isles of Shoals visually immortalizes the natural splendor of this group of islands.  David Park Curry writes, “The finest Shoals images, created between 1889 and 1912, coincide with the full flowering of Hassam’s power as a painter.  Native New Englander Brendan Gill began his book Summer Places with this thought: ‘In our northerly climate, summer is but one of four seasons—a matter of a few delectable weeks of sun and flowering—and yet I doubt if I am alone in finding that my memories of summer are far more numerous, as well as far more vivid, than my memories of any other season.  It is a time of adventure, of taking chances, of letting go.’  Fresh and invigorating, the Isles of Shoals pictures stand out vividly against Hassam’s huge body of work as a whole.  Memories of long-gone summers reach across the years, for his best pieces are still charged with the artist’s sense of adventure as he took chances with composition, let go with color" (Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited, Denver, 1990, p. 14).