Coast Scene, Isles of Shoals

By 1901, the little world that first drew Childe Hassam to the Isles of Shoals was already gone. Through the early 1890s he had summered on Appledore, the largest of these islands ten miles off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, drawn there by the poet Celia Thaxter and the crowded salon and flower garden she kept at her cottage. Thaxter died in 1894, and Hassam turned from her poppies to the bare ledges and open water that ring the islands. This is one of those views: the rocky coves, the cliffs, the Atlantic beyond, worked in clear, high-keyed color and short patterned strokes not far from the coast scenes Monet had painted at Etretat and Pourville a decade earlier. When it reached the Metropolitan in 1909, a gift of the collector George A. Hearn, it was the first painting by Hassam the museum owned.