Summer Sunlight (Isles of Shoals)

By the early 1890s a small island off the New Hampshire coast had become one of the liveliest spots in American art. On Appledore, one of the Isles of Shoals, the poet Celia Thaxter kept a cottage and a famous garden, and each summer she drew writers, musicians and painters out to the rocks. Hassam was one of the regulars, returning season after season. This is one of those summer days: a woman sits reading on the flat, shelf-like ledges above the water, alone with the glare off the sea. Hassam painted the Shoals over and over for the quiet and the hard, clear light out there, so unlike a city studio. Thaxter died in 1894 and the summer colony faded with her, but the light on these rocks is what kept bringing him back.