Bathing Pool, Appledore

By 1907 the Appledore House had been taking summer guests for almost 60 years. The hotel opened in 1848 on Appledore, the largest of the Isles of Shoals, about ten miles off the New Hampshire coast, and at its busiest it held some 500 people, with billiards, bowling and tennis on the lawn. Most of Hassam's later pictures of the island leave all that out and look only at granite and sea. This one brings the holidaymakers back. In the foreground swimmers use the bathing pool in front of a row of brightly painted bathhouses, while others stroll in the midday sun. Hassam looked down on the scene from above, so the view runs on past them to a calm sea and the rounded hump of Babb's Rock. Seven years later the hotel burned down. The canvas came to the museum in 1964, bought from the same New York dealer on the same day as his Paris street scene Grand Prix Day.