Poppies, Isles of Shoals

Hassam painted this on Appledore, one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire, where the poet Celia Thaxter kept a cottage beside her family's summer hotel. Her sitting room was where the writers, musicians and painters who came out for the season gathered, and her garden ran 50 feet by 15, with at least 57 kinds of flower packed into it. Hassam worked there nearly every summer from 1890 until Thaxter died in 1894, and made the illustrations for the book she wrote about that garden. The outcrop in his Appledore pictures, Babb's Rock, he painted many times over. The hotel burned down in 1914 and the garden went with it. It was replanted in the 1970s, using Thaxter's book as the plan.