During the nineteenth century, the Isles of Shoals became one of New England’s most popular summer resorts as well as an important center for artists, writers, and musicians. The flowering of culture on these remote islands was almost single-handedly the work of the poet Celia Thaxter whose family owned the large Appledore House, which was first opened as a hotel in 1848. Thaxter established a prestigious salon, which attracted distinguished figures like the authors Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and artists such as William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam. Celia Thaxter cultivated and inspired this elite intellectual circle, and she contributed to it as well through her own poetic writings and her glorious flower garden. Her book of poems titled An Island Garden resulted in a highly successful collaboration with Childe Hassam who produced a series of stunning watercolors as illustrations for it. Indeed, Hassam developed a close personal friendship with Celia that lasted until her death in 1894.

Hassam first visited the Shoals in 1886 and he returned there regularly throughout the next three decades, creating a rich and diverse body of watercolors, oils, and pastels. His subject matter included views of the lighthouse, interiors of Celia’s parlor, and images of her magnificent garden. However, Hassam was profoundly moved by Celia’s death in 1894, and for a time he had difficulty returning to the island as he explained to a close friend during a visit in 1903, “I felt pretty blue here for the first few days, the place is filled with ghosts.” Nevertheless, when he was finally able to renew his work there, he was inspired by a new subject: the sea and its rugged shoreline. In his coastal scenes of the Isles of Shoals, Hassam depicts the sea with a dazzling jewel-tone palette and the short broken brushwork typical of the impressionist style. Indeed, Hassam’s treatment of this subject closely allies him with the famous French impressionist Claude Monet.

Hassam painted a group of striking color harmonies in 1907 and 1908, and this luminous sunset of the Isles of Shoals from 1911 no doubt relates to this slightly earlier body of work. Painted thickly on small wooden panels, some of them cigar-box tops, these small gems capture the extraordinary natural beauty of the evening skies at Appledore. The exquisite color palette of this work evokes Thaxter's description of these beloved sunsets that "flame in piled magnificence of clouds [as] a long bar lies, like a smouldering brand, along the horizon, deep carmine where the sun has touched it...."1

1 Thaxter, Among the Isles, pp. 93–94.