Rocher de la falaise, Appledore

Childe Hassam spent his summers on Appledore, a rocky little island off the coast of New Hampshire in the group called the Isles of Shoals. For years it had been the gathering place around the poet Celia Thaxter, whose cottage and famous flower garden drew writers, musicians and painters each season. Thaxter had died in 1894, but Hassam kept coming back, and by 1903, when he painted this, he was less taken with her garden than with the bare geology of the place, the ledges and boulders and the water working at them. He brought the bright broken brushwork of French Impressionism to that hard New England coast. The Indianapolis museum bought the canvas in 1906, three years after he made it.