The Lady of the Gorge

The granite of Appledore is cut through by narrow gorges. They formed where bands of softer, darker rock lay trapped between walls of harder granite and wore away over thousands of years, leaving deep clefts that fill with sea water. In the summer of 1912 Hassam went looking for new and more difficult views around the edge of the island, and these gorges were among them. In this one he placed a small nude figure at the bottom, seated at the edge of the dark water beneath a great sunlit mass of rock. He sold the picture that same year to John Pickering Lyman, a Boston collector. When Lyman died in 1914 it passed to his sister Theodora, who gave it to the museum in 1919. Hassam signed it at lower left with the small crescent he drew before his name, and on the back of the canvas he painted his initials and the year inside a round moon.