Childe Hassam 1859 - 1935

Estate of the artist
American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, 1935 (by bequest of the artist)
Milch Galleries, New York
Mr. John Fox, Boston, Massachusetts, 1951
Babcock Galleries, New York, 1960
Mr. and Mrs. James H. Clark, Dallas, Texas
Wildenstein & Co., New York
Private collection (acquired from the above), 1963
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1966

New York, Babcock Galleries, Childe Hassam: Exhibition of Paintings, 1960, no. 15

Very good condition, unlined, some craquelure in sky. Under UV: some thin fine lines of retouching to address craquelure in sky, otherwise fine.
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Small, rocky and isolated, the Isles of Shoals lie ten miles off the Atlantic coast of Maine and New Hampshire coasts. The Shoals were home to noted poet Celia Thaxter, whose family owned the grand Appledore Hotel on the eponymous island. Childe Hassam befriended Thaxter sometime around 1880, and began visiting her on the Isles soon thereafter. Her gracious hospitality attracted a large group of artists, writers and musicians to a kind of informal summer colony at the island retreat. The easygoing, familial atmosphere, along with the beauty of Thaxter's exquisite gardens and the island's dramatic rocky shoreline, greatly appealed to Hassam and he returned nearly every summer for thirty years.

Thaxter's flowers provided the rich artistic inspiration for Hassam's early pictures of the area, but following her death in 1894, he did not visit the Isles of Shoals for five years. When he finally returned in1899, he discovered that a fire had destroyed most of the familiar buildings, including the hotel and Thaxter's carefully-cultivated landscape.  Only the  rugged shoreline remained unchanged. From 1899 until the onset of World War I, seascapes featuring the island's jagged cliffs and inlets, such as Ledges and Bay, Appledore of 1906, dominate Hassam's depictions of the island and its surroundings. Thaxter had shared Hassam's fascination with the ancient layers of bedrock exposed along the island's shore and described the island's topography at length in her 1873 publication, Among the Isles of Shoals. She wrote: "Swept by every wind that blows, and beaten by the bitter brine for unknown ages, well may the Isles of Shoals be barren, bleak, and bare. ...The incessant influences of wind and sun, rain, snow, frost, and spray have so bleached the tops of the rocks that they look hoary as if with age, though in the summer-time a gracious greenness of vegetation breaks here and there the stern outlines, and softens somewhat their rugged aspect... In some places, the geologist will tell you, certain deep scratches in the solid rock mean that here the glacier ground its way across the world's earlier ages" (Among the Isles of Shoals, p. 13).

Ledges and Bay, Appledore conveys the timelessness of the island's ancient landscape as well as the immediacy with which the artist experienced it. Hassam employed vigorous strokes of paint to illuminate the stratified rocks with brilliant highlights. In a scintillating play of light and color, green arbor vitae valiantly grow out of crevasses in the bedrock while small white stitchwort flowers dot the landscape, energizing the surface of the painting. Hassam often painted the rough bare cliffs where the incoming waves would crash against them, but in Ledges and Bay, Appledore he has retreated to a calmer area of the island, and incorporated the greenery that thrives on the terrain's seemingly unforgiving surface, as if in memory of Thaxter's lush gardens.