荒波、ショールズ諸島

In 1913 New York got its first big look at Cezanne, Matisse and Duchamp at the Armory Show, and American art was suddenly told it was old-fashioned. That same year Childe Hassam was out on Appledore, a small island about 10 miles off the New Hampshire coast, painting surf on the rocks the way the French Impressionists had a generation earlier. He kept at this sunlit manner while the fashion in painting moved past it. He returned to these islands summer after summer, and by his own reckoning they gave him nearly a tenth of everything he made. Here he fills a tidal pool with far more colours than the water really holds, greens and violets caught in the spray, with low islands sitting quietly on the horizon.