From the late 188OS to about 1916, Childe Hassam,America's foremost impressionist, frequently visited the Isles of Shoals, the site of a summer resort popular with many American artists and writers. This group of rocky outcroppings off the coast of New Hampshire inspired Hassam to create masterful images in oil,watercolor, and pastel. His first works there were a series of lighthouse images that hint at his future development as an impressionist. Hassam's experiments with light and color are the most vivid representations of this magical haven, where his imagination was nurtured by the surrounding landscape and in the parlor of Celia Thaxter.

A poet and artistic muse to Hassam, Thaxter maintained a salon and a lush flower garden at the Isles of Shoals. Her jewel-like flower beds were the source of his early Shoals paintings. Some of these works, primarily watercolors, illustrated Thaxter's book, An Island Garden. Hassam later moved out of the garden, to depict the rocks and water beyond the island's boundaries.

Paintings from Childe Hassam's Isles of Shoals series are among the most familiar icons of late nineteenth-century American art. But until now, a comprehensive selection of the beautiful Isles of Shoals works have not been collected in one place. David Park Curry's informative text moves from Celia Thaxter's parlor on Appledore, to her garden and the rocky shoreline beyond, tracing the development and importance of Childe Hassam's images of the Isles of Shoals.

DAVID PARK CURRY is currently Deputy Director for Collections at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. After receiving a Ph.D. in the history of art at Yale University, Mr. Curry joined the staff of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, as curator of American art. He has taught in the Department of the History of Art at Yale, served as guest curator for the Old State House Association, Hartford, Connecticut,and as assistant director of the University of Kansas Museum of Art. Mr. Curry was formerly Gates Foundation Curator of American Art at the Denver Art Museum. He is the author of James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art published by W. W. Norton.

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Lenders to the Exhibition

Prologue: A Summer Place

In Celia Thaxter's Parlor

The Garden in Its Glorv

The Rocks of Appledore

Epilogue: Forget-Me-Not

Endnotes

Bibliography

Pictures in the Exhibition

Index