The Old Holley House

On 28 October 1902 Constant, the Holleys' daughter, wrote to her mother that the Hassams had settled into the big room downstairs, "stove up and everything." The Holley house stood above the harbour at Cos Cob, a waterfront village in Greenwich, Connecticut. Its oldest part went back to around 1730, and from the 1880s the family ran it as a boarding house for painters and writers, the heart of the art colony that grew up around it. Hassam came almost every year from 1896, often with his wife, and stayed for weeks or months at a time. He painted its rooms and windows again and again. This small sheet, about 25 by 28 centimetres, is drawn in pastel, and it shows the house itself behind a big tree, with its porch at the right. He dated it 1902, the year of that letter. The house still stands, as a museum of the Greenwich Historical Society.