The Island Garden

Childe Hassam was the leading American Impressionist, a prolific painter of New York street scenes, New England coastlines, and gardens. He studied in Paris in the late 1880s and returned to the United States committed to Impressionism at a time when most American painters were still working in darker, more academic modes. The Island Garden was painted in 1892 on Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine, where the poet Celia Thaxter kept a famous cutting garden. Hassam visited repeatedly throughout the 1890s, painting Thaxter's garden in watercolor and oil. This one is a watercolor — coral and salmon poppies scatter across a field of blue-violet larkspur and green stems, filling the entire surface with no horizon line, no sky, no ground.