By Jessica Skwire Routhier
SALEM, MASS. — Nestled in the curve of Portsmouth Harbor, hovering on the imaginary, watery line that divides Maine from New Hampshire, is the tiny island of Appledore. It is so small as to be all but invisible from the mainland — at least to the naked eye — but once there, visitors experience an indescribable sense of enormity. From the observation tower that perches on the island’s highest point — just 60 feet above sea level — there is a 360-degree view of the Atlantic. Even so, you cannot take the entire island in at once. The crags and cliffs carved by the surf conceal coves and gullies that you have to clamber inside in order to see — that is, to see the astonishing views that they frame and reveal.
These hidden visual delights have inspired writers and artists for more than a century and a half. However, no other artist is more closely associated with Appledore than Childe Hassam, who painted there between 1882 and 1916. Hassam’s sustained engagement with Appledore is subject of “American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals,” at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) through November 6.
Landscape painters become attached to certain places and return to them throughout their careers: think of Constable and Dedham Vale, Cézanne and Aix-en-Provence, Cole and his beloved Catskills. In that way, there is nothing inherently unusual about Hassam’s relationship to Appledore. What is different here is the island itself: the way that its physical isolation and austere geology have made it a laboratory for close observation of change over time.
Hassam’s 35-year-long study of the island is both a parallel and a precursor to the island’s current role as home to the Shoals Marine Laboratory (SML), a marine field station dedicated to undergraduate education. SML’s executive director, Jennifer Seavey, recently noted that in a sense, SML has continued the work that Hassam began as an observer and recorder of this unique, enclosed environment. Indeed, what is special about the island and Hassam’s paintings of it, as well as this particular exhibition, is the blend of art and science and the enthusiastic collaboration of people who practice both of those disciplines in various ways.
Exhibition co-curator Hal Weeks — a predecessor of Seavey’s at SML — notes that “clearly both groups, artists and scientists, are keen observers of nature and natural forms.” The very idea for the show began with questions that arose from close observation, sparked a conversation between an art museum curator and a scientist, and, like the island itself, revealed something both larger and more complex than at first it seemed.
Back in 2010, at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, curator of American art John Coffey was researching three Appledore paintings by Hassam that a donor had promised to the museum. Coffey, a former curator at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, was familiar with the Isles of Shoals but wanted to know more about the specific sites depicted in the paintings. According to Weeks, Coffey sent “a cold email of inquiry to Shoals Marine Laboratory.” The email quickly found its way to Weeks, who, it turned out, had for some time been documenting sites on the island where Hassam painted, matching them up with specific artworks and documenting them photographically.
“Within a day I was able to get back to him with details and photographs,” remembers Weeks, adding that Coffey wrote in thanks, “you have kind of taken away the excuse I had to visit Appledore.” Weeks encouraged him to come anyway. From that point on the art-science-photography project took off, and the idea for an exhibition and book steadily gained steam.
Within three years, PEM had come on board as a project partner. PEM had just hired Austen Barron Bailly as its first curator of American art. She shared Coffey and Weeks’ enthusiasm for this initiative that would, in her words, fit in with the museum’s efforts to be “experiential and innovative” and seek out exhibition themes that are interdisciplinary in nature. With the combined backing of both PEM and the North Carolina museum, the project that Weeks had once thought might become “a cocktail-table book with a printing size of two, maybe my parents and me” was suddenly a major, national museum exhibition.
The curatorial team also expanded to include Kathleen Burnside, the longtime head of the Hassam catalogue raisonné project. As a group, they conducted what all describe as “fieldwork” — a term not normally applied toward art-historical methodology — during several visits to the island over the course of the next few years.
What they discovered is that Hassam was surprisingly faithful to what he saw. The word “surprisingly” is apt, because the Impressionist idiom in which he worked had evolved from a movement whose earliest practitioners were trying to free themselves from slavish faithfulness to observed reality. Hassam absorbed many of the lessons of the larger Impressionist movement — the broken brushwork, the spectral palette, the nontraditional compositions — but, as Burnside points out, in the end he allied himself more with realism.
“There is a lot of scientific information in Childe Hassam’s paintings,” Seavey recently told a group visiting the island. “You could theoretically chronicle sea level rise by examining them, since many of the rock features are still in place.” Standing with her back to Babb’s Rock, a promontory just off the island’s mainland, she held up a reproduction of a Hassam painting of the same scene, demonstrating how he depicted the texture and color of the tidal zones as a series of ombré stripes at the rock’s base. And, as Coffey and Weeks point out in their “field report” in the exhibition catalog, it is possible to pinpoint not only the precise day but also the precise hour at which works like “Moonlight” were painted, or at least conceived, thanks to Hassam’s accurate depiction of the tide, the clouds and the phase of the moon.
Babb’s Rock is best viewed from the outer edge of Celia Thaxter’s garden. As the hostess of Appledore House, the large and impressive hotel established by her husband and father that dominated the island from 1847 to 1914, Thaxter developed a knack for gathering creative people around her. Hassam was only one of many writers and artists who came to Appledore for her company, conversation and inspiration, but by all accounts their relationship was particularly close. There are photographs of Hassam painting on the porch of Thaxter’s cottage. Many of his paintings are of her beloved gardens (carefully restored today by SML), some with her corseted, white-haired form moving among the flowers. The two also collaborated on a book, An Island Garden, written by Thaxter and illustrated with watercolors by Hassam.
Until her death in 1894, Thaxter oversaw a time when island life was characterized by relaxed gentility. The hotel grounds were neatly landscaped, with a sheltered swimming hole carved out of the beach near Babb’s Rock, and visitors enjoyed nightly fine dining and entertainment as they watched swallows perform aerial acrobatics against the backdrop of the setting sun. The swallows and sunsets are still there, but otherwise the experience of being out on the island is very different. SML prides itself, rightfully so, on minimizing its impact on the landscape, so it has left unchecked the steady encroachment of the seagulls and the poison ivy, both of which would have been eliminated without regret in the days of Appledore House.
The gulls, everywhere today, are fierce protectors of their turf during nesting season. Thickets of poison ivy grow as tall as 10 feet. The island is still beautiful — arguably more so than it was as a pleasure ground, if one can judge fairly from historical postcards — but at the same time there is no avoiding the sensory brutality of the cycle of life, death and decay. Hikers on the island trail must take care to step around muskrat scat and seagull carcasses. They must also navigate SML’s trash pit, a necessary evil, to reach Broad Cove, the site of many Hassam paintings. Recently, as visitors cooed over a duck family paddling in a lagoon, Seavey observed that within days the ducklings would be a meal for the gulls.
Death, then, is part of life on Appledore. This is apparent even in Hassam’s work, so frequently sun-drenched and flower-filled. One poignant example is a pair of paintings done from Broad Cove, 11 years apart. Scholars have speculated that the identical compositions of the warm, hazy “Sunrise” and the silvery, ethereal “Moonrise” create a sort of pendant pair that may, consciously or not, memorialize Thaxter, who died in between the painting of the first and the second. Visitors to the show at PEM will discover a similarly elegiac approach in the elegant black and white photographs of Alexandra de Stiguer, which occupy a discrete space in the exhibition.
De Stiguer, the wintertime caretaker of the Isles of Shoals, has the unique experience of being utterly alone on Appledore for mass stretches of time. In the winter, the seagulls keep to themselves. She has unfettered access to every nook and cranny of the island, limited only by snow, ice and her own steam. Her elegantly composed and richly textured photographs participate in the tradition of close observation that connects Hassam and the laboratory. Yet, as she writes, “As I stand upon this far shore among rocks and vistas that have changed so little as to appear almost timeless, I can’t help thinking that, ultimately, it is this place that bears witness to us.”
The occasion of this exhibition at PEM offers outstanding opportunities to engage with Hassam and the remarkable place that he painted. In addition to the exhibition itself — which promises an immersive experience designed, in Bailly’s words, “to convey the experience of being on the island” — the catalog is a beautifully designed and written keepsake, with essays by Bailly, Coffey and Weeks, and Burnside; photo essays by de Stiguer and Weeks; fascinating infographics mapping Hassam’s painting sites; and gorgeous full-page color plates. Visitors can also schedule Hassam and Thaxter-themed expeditions to Appledore through SML and undertake their own field study of the Isles of Shoals.
The Peabody Essex Museum is at 161 Essex Street. For information, 978-745-9500 or www.pem.org. For information about the Shoals Marine Laboratory, 603-862-5346 or www.shoalsmarinelaboratory.org.
