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Childe Hassam

Ellen Robbins, Flower Painter and Perennial Prank Victim

What was it about Ellen Robbins that inspired people to play practical jokes on her?

She made a good living as a flower painter in the 19^th century. Her gorgeous botanical watercolors sold well, in bound books and in frames. She grew up in shabby gentility, helped along by her well-to-do family and friends.

Wildflowers by Ellen Robbins. Chromalithograph. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Summers she spent in fashionable resorts, winters in her Beacon Street studio. Artists more high spirited than she frequented those places, which may explain why Ellen Robbins was the butt of so many jokes. She was prim, temperate, careful. She preferred nature to the social ramble, and she didn’t like displays of wealth, which she considered vulgar.

Toward the end, though, Ellen Robbins got a good laugh on everyone else.

Ellen Robbins

She was born in 1828 in Watertown, Mass., the youngest of seven children. Her father owned a factory, but his business failed and he died when she was two.

She described herself as a plain, sickly child with a lame foot. She grew up poor, but with prominent neighbors and cousins—Maria White, who married James Russell Lowell, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis were both cousins. Her relatives also included a leading family of Watertown, the Thaxters, through whom she would discover the artists’ colony on the Isles of Shoals.

Autumn Leaves, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

As a child, she loved to paint. As the youngest, her sisters played jokes on her. They told her sugared almonds were spiders, which she believed. When presented with the treat, her sisters held out their hands for her almonds, which she gave them.

She attended the School of Design in Boston on the suggestion of her cousin, William Abijah White, an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass. Then, needing to support her family, she got a series of jobs trying to design prints for textiles., For a time she worked at the Merrimac Printworks in Lowell, Mass., and at the Manchester Printworks in Manchester, N.H.

But she never got the hang of it, so she gave up and went home to Watertown. There she attended Stephen Salisbury Tuckerman‘s School of Design, which taught her what she needed to know about watercolor.

Flower Painter

She excelled at painting watercolors of flowers, and decided to create books of spring flowers as they came. Each book had 20 paintings and sold for $25. Here having wealthy friends and relatives paid off. Cousin Hollis Hunnewell bought one for another cousin, a countess living in Paris. Philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway bought another.

“I now began to feel my good fortune had begun,” she wrote.

Ellen Robbins in her studio, photograph by J. Appleton Brown

She then contributed a watercolor of autumn leaves to an exhibit of amateur paintings. Several people who liked her paintings asked her to give lessons, and so she took a class of seven students. Ellen remembered how Susan Cabot Lowell Sohier brought a melon basket filled with flowers to paint, a Herculean task.

Eventually she began giving private lessons She continued to attract pupils, and after many years she had seven classes a week, at $150 a class. Her students came mostly from Boston’s old moneyed families.

“In my classes, when those came, I lived for two hours each day in the fashionable world; and after hearing of balls and parties, the rest that followed in my simple home was most grateful,” she wrote.

The Cool Kids

In addition to Boston’s elite, Ellen Robbins had entree to an expatriate community of American artists in Rome. One of its members, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, had been a close friend since childhood.

Harriet Hosmer, engraving by Auguste Rodin

Hosmer had a relationship with the leader of that expatriate group, the cross-dressing actress Charlotte Cushman. When Cushman was performing in Boston, she visited Robbins’ studio and gave her tickets to her shows. She also gave her a recipe for shampoo that supposedly thickened hair. But the shampoo had red lavendar as an ingredient. When Ellen used it to wash her mother’s hair, it turned pink.

Charlotte Cushman by William Page, 1853. National Portrait Gallery.

Another member of Cushman’s group, sculptor Margaret Foley, suggested Ellen sell her paintings through a Summer Street gallery eventually known as Doll & Richards. The gallery accepted her work, which sold out in a matter of weeks. Henry Ward Beecher was her biggest customer.

She took a studio at the corner of West and Tremont streets in Boston, later at 6 Beacon Street. There she made friends with John Appleton Brown and his wife, who had a studio next to hers.

Asters, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

She kept boxes of butter and sausage on the window ledge overlooking Beacon Street. One day she got a postcard from her landlord remonstrating her for putting food on the window ledge. She went next door to share her indignation with Appleton Brown, who made a show of sympathizing with her. But then his mouth twitched and she realized he had sent the postcard.

Travels

Reflecting on her success, she wrote, “My pictures were in great demand, and everything seemed to help me, for I was almost alone in the painting of flowers, and had relatives who were interested in my success, helping in a financial way.”

Another cousin, Henry Durant, who founded Wellesley College, hired her to paint a frieze at Wellesley (now gone).

She then built a studio in Bar Harbor, where she sold her flower paintings for many summers. But Bar Harbor began to attract wealthy swells, so she changed summer venues to the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine.

Hyacinths, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

There at her family’s hotel, poet Celia Thaxter hosted many artists and literati of the day. Some of them enjoyed playing practical jokes on Ellen Robbins. One night they sneaked a parrot into her bedroom.

Thaxter’s granddaughter remembered how the high-spirited Hassam played another joke on her.

Childe Hassam and Appleton Brown greatly annoyed a most temperate fellow artist, Levi’s cousin Ellen Robbins, by sneaking into her studio and filling her Franklin stove with empty champagne bottles. She was not amused when, the next damp day, she tried to light her fire and was choked by smoke.

Celia Thaxter’s garden at the Isles of Shoals by Childe Hassam

In 1873, she had saved enough to go to Europe with her sister. Again, a wealthy friend helped her out. Two days before she sailed, John Cummings, a wealthy banker, walked into her studio and handed her a letter of credit for a thousand dollars. He told her he wanted her to see Switzerland and Germany.

In London she befriended May Alcott, whose sister Louisa May, had written the blockbuster children’s novel, Little Women.

Ellen Robbins Gets the Last Laugh

The joke was on everyone else in 1893.

Back home in Watertown with her sisters, Ellen, then in her 65th year, fell gravely ill. As she lay in her sickbed, the Young Men’s Republican Club gave a dinner in town. Toward the end of the dinner, the Episcopal minister made some remarks, and ended by pointing to some flowers on the table. He said they reminded him of Miss Ellen Robbins, who painted such realistic flowers. He then added that “she is lying very ill at her house tonight.”

The next day, Ellen’s sister Martha ordered a sewing machine from a man who also worked as an undertaker. He delivered the sewing machine in his undertaker’s wagon. A Mr. Hartwell, who worked in the paper mill nearby, happened to look out the window just as the wagon left the house. One of his workmen had a sister who boarded at the Robbins’ house, and he told Mr. Hartwell Ellen would be the one taken away by the undertaker.

Wildflowers No. 2, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

Mr. Hartman went to tell the minister, who stopped by to pay a condolence call. Startled when he saw Ellen on the sofa embroidering, he said he was pleased to see her looking so well. A stream of visitors followed the next day, all commenting on how happy they were to see Ellen looking so well.

A neighbor, Miss Mary Fitch, wanted to attend her funeral. Mary’s sister heard that a funeral would take place the next day at 2 p.m., and assumed that meant Ellen Robbins would be laid to rest. Mary went to the funeral service, and viewed the remains – of a bald old man wrapped in a shroud. “Oh, how changed,” she said. She soon figured out she’d gone to a stranger’s funeral.

Ellen Robbins lived another 12 years, dying at the age of 77.

With thanks to Reminiscences of a Flower Painter, parts I and II, by Ellen Robbins for the New England Magazine, Vol. 14, 1896. This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Iconic Summer Paintings of New England

New England has no shortage of summer paintings. For centuries, artists have fled cities in summer for the cool air by the seashore or in the mountains. Or perhaps they just took a short train ride from New York or Boston.

They first ventured forth to the White Mountains in the early 19^th century. They explored almost as much as they painted. Later their paintings promoted tourism.

Then summer art colonies began burgeoning throughout New England. In addition to the White Mountain painters, New Hampshire had Cornish and Dublin. Connecticut had Cos Cob and Old Lyme. Massachusetts had Provincetown, the Berkshires, Gloucester and the Lynn Beach Art Colony. Maine had Ogunquit, Monhegan and Skowhegan – as well as every other island and coastal community.

Even tiny Rhode Island and Vermont had their own artist colonies. Vermont had the Dorset painters, and painters favored the South Kingstown hamlet of Matunuck.

So here are six summer paintings, one for each New England state.

The Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob

Couch on the Porch by Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam lived in New York during the winter but in summertime he ventured to various artist colonies. Beginning in the 1890s he began visiting the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich, Conn. Later, he also stayed at Miss Florence Griswold’s Old Lyme art colony.

Hassam, observed the New York Times, was a priest high in the councils of the increasing tribe of American Impressionsts.

Hassam painted The Couch on the Porch in 1914 in Cos Cob. The art colony began when one of the first American Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman, moved to a farmhouse in Greenwich in 1886.

One critic wrote that Cos Cob was to American Impressionism in the 1890s what Argenteuil was to French Impressionism in the 1870s.

Instead of historical scenes or famous people, the impressionsts painted landscapes and scenes of everyday middle-class life. They relied on natural light, quick brush strokes and a bright palette.

A short train ride took Twachtman’s friends from New York City to Greenwich. Some stayed at his home or boarded at the Holley House, now known as the Bush-Holley House. The colonists included such artists as J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid and Theodore Robinson, as well as writers Lincoln Steffens and Willa Cather.

Summer, North Haven

The American Impressionists just loved to paint young women in white dresses outside in bright sunshine. Frank Weston Benson mastered the theme in many of his summer paintings.

Frank Weston Benson, was born in Salem, Mass., and he grew up with a love of the outdoors. As a boy he spent many hours duck hunting in the marshes around Salem.

In 1882, when he turned 21, his parents gave him $2,000 for a trip to Europe. He studied the old masters as well as the work of Claude Monet. When he returned, he established himself as an artist, married and had four chldren, which he frequently painted.

“I follow the light, where it comes from, where it goes,” he once said.

He enjoyed success as an artist, winning many medals for his work. During the summer, Frank Weston Benson painted on the Maine island of North Haven, as well as in the New Hampshire towns of New Castle and Dublin. He painted Summer in 1909 using his wife and three daughters as models.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photos-frank-weston-benson-painter-light/

Eventually, critics derided his paintings as “too pretty,” so he returned to his first love. Benson mastered waterfowl etchings, and even designed the second Federal Duck Stamp.

Cape Cod Morning, Truro

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death at 85 in 1967.

He painted the dunes and cottages on Cape Cod, the rolling hills and farms of Vermont, the rocky shore of Maine, the tenements and fishing fleets of Cape Ann.

From 1930 to 1967, Hopper spent most of every summer on Cape Cod, creating a number of summer paintings. He explained why he chose the Cape in 1962:

I chose to live here because it has a longer summer season. I like Maine very much, but it gets so cold in the fall. There’s something soft about Cape Cod that doesn’t appeal to me too much. But there’s a beautiful light there — very luminous – perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.

He loved to suggest the inner life of human beings, something he called “a vast realm.” He also once said all he wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Cape Cod Morning, painted in 1950, is quintessential Hopper. He captures a feeling of tension and isolation, as well as sunlight on the side of a house.

Saco River, White Mountains

In the 19^th century, hundreds of artists traveled to the White Mountains to paint the splendor of what was then wilderness.

White Mountain art started in 1826, when a widely reported tragedy began to attract people to the region. Nine members of the Willey household perished in a landslide.

Then Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

Alfred Thompson Bricher, born in 1837 in Portsmouth, N.H., started out as a businessman in Boston. However, he switched to landscape painting full-time, which turned out to be a good career move. A member of the Hudson River School of Art, he specialized in marinescapes. However, he did make painting forays into the White Mountains, including Summer on the Saco (Mount Chocorua).

Second Beach, Newport

There was nothing middle-class about this scene of Second Beach in Newport, R.I. Worthington Whittredge, a late-Hudson River School painter, painted it in 1878-1880. Newport then ruled as a fashionable summer resort for the Gilded Age elite.

Southern planters had begun coming to Newport to escape the summer heat in the mid-19^th century. Northerners then started to arrive and to build lavish summer cottages. When Whittredge painted Second Beach, Newport was still on the way up. The Vanderbilts, for example, had yet to build two of the most opulent “cottages,” the Breakers and Marble House.

This summer painting shows fashionable people dipping their toes in the water and a horse-drawn carriage at the other end of the beach.

Swimming Hole, Arlington

Though born in New York City suburb, Norman Rockwell created the iconography of 20^th century small town New England.

Rockwell’s career followed the Golden Age of Illustration a period of brilliant book and magazine illustration. It ran from the 1880s to the 1920s. Rockwell began his studies at the Art Students League of New York in 1911. Inspired by such Golden Age illustrators as Howard Pyle, Rockwell decided to devote himself to illustration.

For 20 years he worked for Boys Life magazine, living in New Rochelle with his wife and three sons. But by 1938, he needed a restart, so he bought a farmhouse in Arlington. Rural Vermont inspired him to develop into the teller of fictional stories about small town America.

He had no interest in the natural beauty around him. Instead, he sought out diners, dentists offices and schoolhouses.

In 1945, he decided to paint a salesman who takes a dip into a swimming hole on a hot summer day.

Rockwell painted his neighbor George Zimmer, who posed as the salesman. It made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, one of seven for which Zimmer modeled. Many of Rockwell’s summer paintings appeared on Post covers.

Rockwell paid close attention to details. In Swimming Hole, he tells the story of the salesman making a long drive and stopping at a swimming hole. He parks his car and methodically takes off his shirt and tie, hangs it up, lays his glasses on a newspaper and then his cigar on a shoe.

“George Zimmer, my model,” Rockwell said, “was an awful good sport. He stripped and I poured several buckets of water over his head to get the effect.”

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Six Paintings of New England Spring

Artists have probably created far fewer New England spring paintings than of any of the three other seasons. After all, New England has so little spring. The cold gray months morph into mud season and then black fly season. And then, suddenly, it’s the Fourth of July and summer.

And yet New England’s artists have managed to capture what is appealing about the brief New England spring. Maple sugaring. Apple blossoms. Bird’s nests. Brilliant, clear light on sunny days. Romantic moonlit nights.

So here are six paintings of New England spring, one in each state.

New England Spring by Moonlight

May Night by Willard Metcalf. National Gallery of Art.

Willard Metcalf painted May Night, one of his best works, while at the Old Lyme artist colony in Connecticut.

Metcalf was born into a working class family in Lowell, Mass., in 1858. He began painting at 16 and opened a studio in Boston at 18. Early success allowed him to study in Europe for five years.

He then moved around the Northeast, teaching and painting portraits and illustrations. Then he moved to Gloucester, Mass., and devoted himself to landscape painting. His friend Childe Hassam encouraged him to join the Old Lyme artist colony, where he could find high thinking and low living.

May Night depicts the home of Miss Florence Griswold, who founded the Old Lyme colony. In 1907, Metcalf won the Corcoran gold medal for it, along with a $3,000 purchase price. But Old Lyme probably lost its charm for him when his wife ran off with one of his students that year. The painting now belongs to the National Gallery of Art.

Metcalf then spent time at the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire, where he painted many landscapes of the changing seasons. One critic called him “the poet laureate of the New England hills.”

The Corcoran Gallery held a major exhibition of his work in 1925, the year he died of a heart attack at age 66.

Spring on a Farm

Spring, by Winslow Homer. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Winslow Homer, born in Boston, Mass., in 1837, learned watercolor at his mother’s knee. He apprenticed to a lithographer for a few years, but hated it. For the next 20 years he illustrated life in Boston and rural New England as well as battlefield scenes during the Civil War.

He then moved to New York, but traveled frequently, painting all the way. In the spring of 1878 he produced 50 watercolors, admired for their fluidity and sparkle. Spring, painted on a farm, is one of them.

Homer eventually grew reclusive around 1880. His family owned an estate on Prout’s Neck in Maine, and Homer moved into the carriage house. He painted the sea in Maine, traveling to the Caribbean during the winter and sometimes to the Adirondacks.

Though he also painted in oil, Winslow Homer knew he’d done something transcendent with his watercolors.

“You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors,” Homer once said. He hung some of his exquisite watercolors on the walls of the rental cottages. Now they’re in museums or private collections. His 1878 watercolor Spring belongs to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

‘As if the year were all springtime’

Still Life with Robin’s Nest by Fidelia Bridges. Private Collection.

Fidelia Bridges, born in 1834, was one of the very few women artists who could support herself with her work. She only painted birds and plants, which she rendered with exquisite detail and a poetic sensibility.

She ‘paints as if the year were all springtime,’ wrote one critic.

Bridges was often lonely and sad, but her exquisite paintings convey a lyrical joy in the birds and flowers she loved.

Fidelia Bridges was the daughter of a Salem sea captain who plied the China trade. Her parents’ death when she was 15 impoverished her family, but wealthy patrons allowed her to study art in Philadelphia and Europe.

She painted some of her best works in Stratford, Conn., along the Housatonic River. She also sold her work to Louis Prang, who invented the American Christmas card in Boston. For a time she worked as governess for Mark Twain’s children.

Girl on Rock

Spring by Maxfield Parrish. Illustration for Life magazine, 1922 Easter edition

The landscape of Vermont and New Hampshire inspired Maxfield Parrish in 1922 to create lush, romantic paintings like Spring.

Parrish belonged to the Cornish Art Colony from 1898, when he and his wife built a house in Plainfield, N.H. He downplayed his own abilities, calling himself “commonplace” and “a mechanic.”

He used an ancient technique to paint, starting with a monochrome underpainting and then layering transparent glazes. It made him rich and famous. His 1922 painting Daybreak was the most popular art print of the 20^th century, appearing in one out of every four households.

His painting Spring appeared as the Easter cover art for Life magazine April 6, 1922. Parrish then got sick of painting lissome nymphs in outdoor settings. No more girls on rocks, he told the Associated Press in 1931. From then until his death in 1960 he abandoned illustration and painted landscapes.

Apple Trees in a Meadow

Apple Trees in a Meadow by Edward Bannister. High Museum

Edward Bannister stunned the judges of the art competition at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. When he came to receive his gold medal, they were astonished to discover they’d awarded it to an African American.

After winning the prize he prospered as an artist, working out of his studio in Providence, R.I.

Bannister credited his wife, Christiana, with everything he accomplished. She ran several hair salons and told him to devote himself to his painting. Once his paintings started to sell, they spent summers in a cottage on Narragansett Bay. He often painted en plein air.

In 1890, Bannister painted Apple Trees in a Meadow, a familiar sight during the New England spring.

Bannister died in 1901, and his work fell into obscurity. He has since been rediscovered. Apple Trees in a Meadow now belongs to the High Museum in Atlanta.

New England Spring, Vermont Style

American Forest Scene–Maple Sugaring by Arthur Tait

You may well recognize this lithograph as a Currier and Ives, originally sold as a cheap and popular print but now quite collectible.

Nathaniel Currier started off in Boston but eventually moved to New York. Once he hit on the formula of dramatic scenes of newsworthy events, he was on his way. He teamed up with James Merritt Ives and they expanded into scenes of city life, portraits, politics, boats and landscapes.

The firm made prints from the work of the most celebrated artists of the day: Eastman Johnson, George Inness and Thomas Nast. It also employed its own artists, like Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, who specialized in sporting scenes.

New England winter scenes proved especially popular. Snow, however, is not unknown during a New England spring.

Arthur Tait, a British-American artist, painted American Forest Scene—Maple Sugaring. Though he lived in New York, we’re choosing to call this a Vermont scene, as it produces more maple syrup than any other state.

Currier and Ives lasted 72 years before going out of business.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Spring by Parrish, Plum Leaves via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0; Robin’s Nest (1863, private collection) public domain PD-US.

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Matilda Browne, Just One of the Boy Artists

Matilda Browne won so much respect from her fellow artists they let her paint on a door in Miss Florence Griswold’s house in Old Lyme, Conn.

Peonies, by Matilda Browne

The Old Lyme Art Colony, the most famous collection of artists in its day, mostly included men. Raucous Bohemians, they did not think much of women artists.

Matilda Browne was an exception — the only woman allowed to paint on one of the celebrated panels inside Miss Florence’s Georgian mansion. She was also the only woman portrayed in a mural painted by Henry Rankin Poore on the overmantle in the house. Called The Fox Chase, it caricatured 23 of the Old Lyme artists chasing after a fox. Poore depicted Matilda Browne with her arms raised in shock at the sight of Childe Hassam painting shirtless en plein air.

Matilda Browne at 25

A Good Neighbor

Matilda Browne was born May 8, 1869 in Newark, N.J. Her family lived next door to Thomas Moran, an acclaimed Hudson River School painter. Moran let nine-year-old Matilda visit him while he worked in his studio. Soon he let her experiment with his paint and canvas.

She impressed Moran with her talent and he encouraged her to take art lessons. At 12, National Academy of Design in New York accepted one of her flower paintings for an exhibition.

She loved to paint flowers and animals, especially ox-teams, horses, dairy cows and sheep. Her mother took her to Europe in 1889 to study with French and Dutch artists who specialized in painting animals. Her mother also bought calves from the local agricultural fair for Matilda to paint. When she finished the painting, she traded the calf for another.

In New York she studied with Carleton Wiggins. He not only painted livestock, but probably introduced her to the high-thinking, low-living summer art colony in Old Lyme, Conn. The Old Lyme art colony played an important role in incubating American Impressionism.

Acceptance

Matilda arrived in 1905, and the male artists immediately accepted her. But they disdained the young female art students they called ‘blots on the landscape.’ One of the Old Lyme artists, Willard Metcalf, painted an image of one of his young women students and called it Poor Little Bloticelli.

Inn the Garden by Matilda Browne

By the time Matilda Browne reached Old Lyme, she was the artistic equal of the men who boarded there over the summer. She had won a number of awards and, as one critic wrote, ‘she often wields her brush with almost masculine vigor.’ She was also stout, serious and a little lame, which probably inspired the men to treat her like a sister.

Her subject for the door panels? A pair of calves grazing peaceably.

Matilda Browne returned to Old Lyme periodically between 1911 and 1924. She also painted in Greenwich, Conn., at the Cos Cob Art Colony, and in New York City. Around 1918 she married writer Frederick van Wyck. She died in Greenwich on Nov. 3, 1947.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Celia Thaxter: ‘So Still and Heavenly and Fresh and Full of Promise’

Celia Thaxter found solace, friendship and fame on the Isles of Shoals, a tiny archipelago off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. She had grown up on one of the larger islands, White, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper. Her poems and stories about the island captivated her readers. And her island garden, which contained 57 flowers, inspired her artist friends.

Celia Thaxter around 1880

A letter to her friend Rose Lamb on August 29, 1889, typifies her island-inspired prose.

To-night there is the most delicious slender red crescent sinking slowly in the west, throwing a mysterious glimmer on the calm sea; there isn’t a whisper of wind, and it is balmy and beautiful; windows and doors all open; a most heavenly night. Now people begin to come and I must stop.

Celia Thaxter, Early Life

She was born Celia Laighton on June 29, 1835, in Portsmouth, N.H. Her father, Thomas Laighton, was appointed lighthouse keeper on White Island. Celia only had her two brothers, Cedric and Oscar, to play with. Of her island life, she once wrote,

One of the first things a settler on the Isles of Shoals has to learn is to live as independently as possible.

White and Seavey islands

At 16, she married her tutor, Levi Thaxter, a Harvard graduate 11 years her senior. He had come to the islands hoping to make money from the hotel Thomas Laighton was building on Appledore Island. Soon he tired of island life and persuaded Celia to move to the mainland.

They moved to Newtonville, Mass., and immersed themselves in Boston’s literary circles. At 17 Celia gave birth to her son Karl, who was injured during delivery. He was bright, but nervous, temperamental and dependent. Soon she gave birth to another son, John, and then her youngest, Roland, who became a prominent mycologist.

Celia Thaxter house in Newtonville

Levi took the boys on long hunting trips, which Celia resented. She also hated living in Newtonville. She called her home ‘a household jail’ and complained of the ‘hideous ironing. ..the trinity of the soapkettle, the ashcan and the cookstove.’ She wrote a poem called Landlocked, which Levi discovered and took to publisher James T. Fields. He published the poem, and many others by Celia, in the Atlantic. Celia became friends with his wife, Annie Adams Fields, who ran a literary salon on Beacon Hill.

Back to Appledore

In 1866, Celia’s father died and she spent more time on Appledore Island, helping her family with the hotel. Her growing literary fame attracted artists, writers and intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sarah Orne Jewett, James and Annie Fields.

The Appledore House and assorted buildings 1901

John Whittier showed her special kindness. The artist William Morris Hunt, a close family friend, visited the Isles frequently — and died there.

His student, portrait painter Rose Lamb, became a friend of Celia Thaxter’s. After her death, Lamb and Annie Fields compiled a book of her letters. In the introduction, they wrote, “Her “parlor,” as it was called, was a milieu quite as interesting as any of the “salons” of the past.”

In one letter to Lamb, on April 15, 1894, Celia Thaxter wrote,

I cannot tell you how beautiful it is to be here, and I wish for you every day. It is so still and heavenly and fresh and full of promise. I work all day long, mostly out of doors, and there are so many pleasant things to do. Not easy, there is a great deal of hard work, but I love it all.

Childe Hassam painted several pictures of her in her garden, which had its own celebrity. Its flowers filled the rooms at Appledore House. She wrote a book about it called An Island Garden, which Hassam illustrated. The Shoals Marine Laboratory, now on Appledore, has recreated the garden.

“Poppies” from Celia Thaxter’s garden by Childe Hassam

Celia Thaxter and Birds

Celia Thaxter grew outraged by the slaughter of birds for ladies’ hats, which she called “funeral pyres they carry on their heads.” She took the post of secretary of the Audubon Society of Waltham, Mass., in 1886. The next year she wrote an article for the first issue of Audubon Magazine called ‘Women’s Heartlessness.’

She also struck up a correspondence with Bradford Torrey, an ornithologist who published a popular book, Birds in the Bush. “I am all the time vexed at my ignorance, and wish somebody were here to tell me the different birds and recognize those delicious voices,” she wrote in a letter to him in 1890.

Celia Thaxter In Her Garden by Childe Hassam

Heavenly and Fresh

By 1893 she had grandchildren. “I don’t think I ever realized what “fun” was until I became a grandmother!” she wrote to her friend, Feroline W. Fox. “Isn’t it delightful?”

Celia Thaxter died suddenly on Aug. 25, 1894 at the age of 59. Four months before her death she wrote to Rose Lamb.

I cannot tell you how beautiful it is to be here, and I wish for you every day. It is so still and heavenly and fresh and full of promise. I work all day long, mostly out of doors, and there are so many pleasant things to do. Not easy, there is a great deal of hard work, but I love it all; and Karl is so good and helps me with the heaviest, and we have such a good time together.

The garden is a wilderness of sticks and stalks and rubbish from last year, and it is a job to begin, after pruning the roses, to clear all this away, to dig up the hollyhock roots that have sowed themselves outside and transplant in the inside of the fence, to fork over and manure all the earth, etc.

Celia Thaxter’s cottage on the Isles of Shoals.

I have my mother’s big, sunny room, with one opening out of it for Karl; and the large bay window is full of tables, and boxes of seeds that I am watching with as much delight as if I had never done it before. It is such a pleasure.

I am busy every instant, so glad and thankful to be here. No tongue can tell it; just to be here, it is all I ask. Sometimes I am afraid I enjoy it too much, and wonder what ever would become of me if I had to be away.

Flowers from her garden covered her coffin.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Celia Thaxter house in Newtonville By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20433891.

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High Thinking and Low Living in Old Lyme

Florence Griswold suffered reversals of fortune that, in the end, transformed her beautiful old Georgian home into the Old Lyme Art Colony, the most famous collection of artists in its day. In the process, she gave Old Lyme, Conn., a new identity and shaped the careers of a generation of artists.

Boston Common at Dusk by Childe Hassam, member of the Old Lyme Art Colony

Florence Griswold

Florence Griswold was born Dec. 25, 1850 in Old Lyme, Conn., the youngest of four children. Her family was descended from early settlers of the town, and her father was a prosperous sea captain. In 1841 he bought a Georgian mansion on a 12-acre estate for his new bride.

Two decades later, the arrival of the Civil War and steam-powered vessels forced Florence’s father into early retirement. Bad investments cost him his fortune.

Old Lyme, once a prosperous shipbuilding town, fell on hard times as well.

So to make ends meet, Florence’s mother and two sisters in 1878 turned the rambling house into a school for girls. Then Florence and her sister Adele found themselves in a financial bind when their father, mother and sister died.

In 1892 the sisters started to take in boarders, an acceptable way for women to make money and a fortunate choice for Florence and the American art world.

Florence Griswold. Painting titled The Harpist by Alphonse Jongers, 1903. Courtesy Florence Griswold Museum.

The Old Lyme Art Colony

In 1899, artist Henry Ward Ranger came to Old Lyme, having just returned from the European art scene. He saw in the pretty coastal town an American version of France’s Barbizon, which spawned its own school of art.

Ranger rented a room from Miss Florence and encouraged his friends to come to Old Lyme. The next year, his friends Lewis Cohen, Henry Rankin Poore, Louis Paul Dessar, and William Henry Howe joined him. Two hundred more artists would pass through the colony over the next three decades, creating a school of art known as American Impressionism.

Florence Griswold called herself ‘the keeper of the art colony.” The artists called her Miss Florence. She charged $7 a week for a room, which included meals, a daily pitcher of water and a kerosene lamp to find one’s way to one’s rooms (or around the rooms) at night. She made sure the artists returned year after year by writing them during the winter.

Miss Florence also took a strong interest in the artists’ work and forever tried to sell their paintings. She turned the front hall into a gallery, where she sold the artists’ framed paintings and old furniture.

In August 1902, 12 of the artists put on an exhibition in the Old Lyme Public Library. The Hartford Courant reported the library was ‘thronged’ by visitors from Hartford, New Haven, Middletown, New York, New London, Boston, Chicago, Springfield and elsewhere.

Detail from May Night (1906) by Willard Metcalf, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The painting depicts the Griswold house.

Childe Hassam Arrives

The success of the exhibit may have attracted Childe Hassam the next year. Hassam, a prolific and influential artist, then in his 40s, had a lot of friends. As the popularity of the summer exhibitions grew, some of the country’s best artists began making the pilgrimage to Old Lyme.

The artists turned barns and sheds into studios. They painted the First Congregational Church, the bridge nearby and old fruit orchards. Mountain laurel, which grew especially well in Old Lyme, was a favorite subject for many of the artists. One artists stuck cotton balls to laurel shrubs so he could paint them after their blossoms faded.

Miss Florence created a warm, cheerful atmosphere. She also provided a respectable veneer for the bohemian habits of the artists. Childe Hassam, in a July 3, 1905 letter, called the Griswold house ‘just the place for high thinking and low living.’ Archaeologists later discovered a stash of beer, wine and liquor bottles in the crawl space under Hassam’s studio.

Detail from “Church at Old Lyme,” oil on canvas, by Childe Hassam. Courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

No Inconsiderable Chapter

Caroline Weir Ely, daughter of artist J. Alden Weir, knew the Old Lyme Art Colony well.

“Miss Florence was the life of the house,” she wrote, “happy go lucky, always ready to get up a picnic, arbitrator of quarrels, and the first to lead the way to the abundant larder, which, night after night, was raided of its new cakes and pies.”

Miss Florence died in 1937. In her obituary, the New York Times wrote, “This generous spirit survives; and not in the Griswold House alone, but as part of no inconsiderable chapter in the history of our native art.”

Her legacy lives on in the renowned Florence Griswold Museum, the ‘Home of American Impressionism.’ You can visit the museum campus year round (click here for more information).

This story about the Old Lyme Art Colony was updated in 2022.

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