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The South Ledges, Appledore
1913
Childe Hassam
Born: Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859
Died: East Hampton, New York 1935
oil on canvas
34 1/4 x 36 1/8 in. (87.0 x 91.6 cm.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of John Gellatly
1929.6.62
Smithsonian American Art Museum
2nd Floor, East Wing
Hassam spent many summers on Appledore Island off the coast of Maine. Every year, he and a circle of musicians, writers and other artists made an informal colony based at the home of his friend, the poet Celia Thaxter. In Thaxter's gardens and on the rocky beaches, Hassam used the flickering brushwork and brilliant colors he had adopted in France to capture the spangled light of Appledore's brief summer. This painting evokes the leisurely, seasonal rhythms of America's privileged families in the last years before the Great War. A beautifully dressed woman shields her face from the sun; she looks down and away, as if absorbed in the song of a sandpiper, the island bird that inspired Celia Thaxter's most famous children's poem.
Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
Keywords
Figure(s) in exterior - water
Landscape - coast
Landscape - island - Appledore Island
Landscape - Maine - Appledore Island
Landscape - rocks
Waterscape - sea - Atlantic Ocean
painting
paint - oil
fabric - canvas
About Childe Hassam
Born: Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859 Died: East Hampton, New York 1935
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