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Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine by Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam · 1890-01-01

This is Childe Hassam's 'Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine,' painted in 1890 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met acquired it for $4.5 million, a record for the artist at the time. But the money story starts years earlier, when a pastel of this same garden by Hassam was stolen from a museum, eventually recovered, and then sold at auction for nearly $2 million.

Let your eye go first to the dense mass of orange poppies in the foreground. Hassam applied the paint so thickly, in a technique called impasto, that each petal casts a tiny real shadow. Then look past them, to that pale sliver of ocean, it anchors the whole view and explains the crisp, salty light flooding the flowers.

Hassam painted this on Appledore Island, part of the Isles of Shoals off the Maine-New Hampshire coast. The garden belonged to the poet Celia Thaxter, who hosted a summer salon for writers and artists. Hassam visited nearly every summer for twenty years, producing many of his best-loved works right here among the poppies.

A garden on a windswept rock, planted by a poet, painted by an American Impressionist, and now valued in the millions. Not a bad return for some thick paint and a lot of coastal sun.

Details

A few years later, the Met paid four and a half million for this canvas.
A few years later, the Met paid four and a half million for this canvas.
This is the Isles of Shoals, a remote artists' retreat off the Maine coast.
This is the Isles of Shoals, a remote artists' retreat off the Maine coast.
Childe Hassam came here summer after summer to paint her flowers.
Childe Hassam came here summer after summer to paint her flowers.
The sky is thin and high-keyed, flooding everything below with coastal summer light , it sets the painting's entire mood and color temperature.
The sky is thin and high-keyed, flooding everything below with coastal summer light , it sets the painting's entire mood and color temperature.
Loose, gestural brushwork here verges on abstraction , the poppies dissolve into strokes of color rather than described forms, a signature Impressionist move.
Loose, gestural brushwork here verges on abstraction , the poppies dissolve into strokes of color rather than described forms, a signature Impressionist move.
Transcript

In 2011, a pastel sold for nearly two million dollars. It showed this exact garden, by the same painter. A few years later, the Met paid four and a half million for this canvas. Look how the orange poppies are built with thick, sculptural paint. Behind the flowers: a strip of pale blue ocean. This is the Isles of Shoals, a remote artists' retreat off the Maine coast. The garden belonged to poet Celia Thaxter. Childe Hassam came here summer after summer to paint her flowers.