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monhegan island

Monhegan Murder Mystery: What Did Rockwell Kent Know?

In 2013, Jamie Wyeth’s new portrait of Rockwell Kent on Monhegan Island, paintbrush and palette in hand, was exhibited at the Brandywine River Museum of American Art. (See it here.) In the background a body was falling off a cliff. The body belonged to Sally Maynard Moran, a former mistress of Kent. Wyeth denied he was suggesting Kent killed Moran in an unsolved Monhegan murder.

He explained it was simply part of his series about “untoward events that have occurred on Monhegan over the years and this, of course, is one of them.”

The Red House, watercolor by Jamie Wyeth, 1972

Rockwell Kent

Rockwell Kent was born 1882 in Tarrytown, N.Y., to a relatively affluent family. He studied at Columbia University and at the Art Student’s League. In 1903, he also had an apprenticeship with Monadnock painter Abbott Handerson Thayer.

Rockwell Kent around 1920

Kent found inspiration in nature, and read deeply in the works of Transcendentalist philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In 1905 he moved to Monhegan Island off the Maine coast, where he built several cottages and a large house at the water’s edge, known today as the Red House.

Success

His paintings of the island won critical acclaim. He moved on to paint other landscapes that inspired him: in Minnesota, Newfoundland, Alaska, Vermont, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland and Greenland.

In 1926, publisher R.R. Donnelley asked Kent to illustrate Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Kent, who loved maritime adventure, suggested Moby Dick instead. The publisher agreed, and Kent set about studying whaling lore and history. His illustrated an edition of Moby Dick, released in 1930, that sold out immediately.

He was also in demand as a magazine illustrator. Under the name Hogarth, Jr., he created whimsical pen-and-ink drawings for Vanity Fair, New York Tribune, Harper’s Weekly and Life.

Red Baiting

But Rockwell Kent became increasingly radical and outspoken during World War II. He took an increasingly active role in progressive politics, and he remained patriotic toward the United States.

Island Village by Rockwell Kent, courtesy Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

After the war he advocated friendship and peace with the Soviet Union. U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy targeted him during the red-baiting era, and his reputation suffered. Once one of the most famous, well-paid artists of his day, he was no longer in demand as an artist or illustrator.

Brewing Storm by Rockwell Kent. Courtesy Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

In the summer of 1953, Sally Maynard Moran visited Monhegan. She stayed at one of the cottages the artist still owned, joined by his daughter, Mrs. Kathleen Finney, and her children. One day she announced she was going to take a walk. She was never seen again alive.

Three weeks after she disappeared, her body was discovered floating in the ocean off Portland Light.

“Mrs. Sally Maynard Moran, 49, New York society figure whose disappearance from the artists’ colony was a sensation last July, was murdered and thrown into the sea on the Maine coast, officials announced today,” reported the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 4, 1953.

Monhegan Murder

Pathologists had determined she died of blunt force trauma to the head. They said she couldn’t have fallen from Monhegan’s 100-foot cliffs, because her body would have had multiple bruises and fractures. The only other injury Sally Moran suffered was a broken arm.

Investigators learned two strange men were seen walking near the Kent cottage on the night of her death. An islander heard a voice shout, “Get your hands off me.”

Did Rockwell Kent have something to do with the murder of Sally Maynard? The rumor dogged him for years.

Monhegan’s rocky shore

The theory about the Monhegan murder had several flaws. One was that Kent was in New York at the time of Sally Maynard’s death.

Another was that she wasn’t murdered – at least according to her grandniece, Martha Wolfe of Winchester, Va. The Kennebec County attorney general gave Wolfe copies of the cold case file in 2006. Wolfe then pored over the files and concluded her great-aunt’s death was an accident.

Kent and his wife believed she committed suicide because she couldn’t face leaving the island. They had gotten her a job as a secretary because her ex-husband’s business reverses lowered her alimony. Sally Maynard Moran had allen into despair and uncertainty, her psychiatrist told the Kents.

Kent and Wyeth

Rockwell Kent sold the Monhegan cottage after Sally Moran died. He never returned to the island. From his 40s on he lived and painted at the Adirondack farm he called Asgaard. He died of a heart attack in 1971.

Jamie Wyeth long found Kent fascinating. He collected Kent’s work and even bought a house owned by Kent on Monhegan. In 1972, he painted The Red House.

Then in 2013, the Brandywine River Museum of American Art in Chadds Ford, Pa., held the exhibit featuring Wyeth’s portrait of Kent, titled, Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Monhegan.

This story about the Monhegan murder mystery was updated in 2022.

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Edward Hopper paints sunlight in New England

Edward Hopper is known for his paintings of urban isolation, and yet he did some of his best loved work in rural and small town New England. From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death in 1967.

Lighthouse and Buildings, Portland Head, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, 1927, courtesy Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Lighthouse Hill, 1927, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts

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. And all along the coast he painted lighthouses.

Lighthouses had not yet become an artistic cliché. It was Hopper who made the lighthouse a representative and enduring American image, observed Carl Little in Edward Hopper’s New England.

Edward Hopper may have seen something of himself in the lighthouses. He was 6’5”, taciturn and an artistic loner. Preferring representational art, he stood apart from the abstract painters of his day. He explained why:

The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design.

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper was born July 22, 1882, in Nyack N.Y., to a prosperous middle-class family that encouraged his interest in art.

He studied under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at what became the Parsons New School of Design. To support himself, he went into illustration, which he hated. He took three trips to Europe to alleviate the tedium of commercial work. But in the end trips to Europe weren’t enough to inspire him back at his studio in New York City. As he approached 30 he sank into depression, sitting for days at a time before his easel “in hopeless unhappiness, unable to raise a hand to break the spell.”

Gloucester Harbor, 1912

In 1912 he took his first trip to Gloucester, Mass., which broke that spell.

Leaving his train at the Gloucester station, he could walk to his lodgings downtown. He wandered around the city sketching and painting. The trolley allowed him to explore any neighborhood he wished. Today, visitors can see the same steps, sidewalks, houses and rocks he painted a century ago. (To take a self-guided Hopper tour of Hopper’s Gloucester, click here.)

The Coast

He spent the summers of 1914 and 1915 in Ogunquit, Maine, and returned to the coast again and again.

Blackhead, Monhegan, 1919. Whitney Museum of American Art

In 1916-1919 he went to Monhegan Island in Maine. There he carted around wood panels, usually 12” by 16,” and painted the rocky cliffs with thick, loose strokes.

He was back in Gloucester in 1923 for the city’s 300^th anniversary celebration. That was the year he started painting in watercolor, an excellent medium for New England’s light. Painting next to him was fellow student Jo Nivison, who he married the next year. Jo modeled for many of the women in his paintings. – like Cape Cod Morning.

The Mansard Roof, 1923, Brooklyn Museum

Edward Hopper once said all he wanted to do was ‘to paint sunlight on the side of a house.’ In Gloucester in 1923 he painted the superb The Mansard Roof, treating light and shadow in a way that gave an inanimate structure life and motion. The Brooklyn Museum bought the painting, and a show of his watercolors then sold out. Hopper was in his 40s and coming into his own.

During his lifetime he painted more than 100 works from Gloucester, returning in 1924, 1926 and 1928.

Two on the Aisle, 1927, Toledo Museum of Art

Wheels

In 1927 he sold Two on the Aisle for $1,500, the most he’d ever sold a painting for, and he bought a car with the money.

The car allowed him to explore more of New England – Rockland and Portland in Maine, South Royalton in Vermont, South Truro on Cape Cod. On a visit to Portland in 1927 he painted one of his many lighthouses, Lighthouse and Buildings.

From 1930 to 1967, Hopper spent most of every summer on Cape Cod. He explained why 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.

His wife called it a ‘wonderful land of bare green sandy hills.’

Corn Hill, 1930, McNay Art Museum

Cape Cod and Vermont

Instead of mansard roofs and cliffs, sand dunes and rolling hills made up the Cape’s landscape. Edward Hopper tackled that subject on his first summer on Cape Cod in 1930 with paintings like Corn Hill.

At first they rented houses in South Truro. Then in 1934, the Hoppers built their summer house in South Truro, a simple, shingled house.

First Branch of the White River, Vermont, 1938, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The Hoppers also took side trips in the summer, to the Southwest, Mexico and Vermont. From 1935-38, they visited Vermont. In ’37 and ’38 they stayed in South Royalton, near White River Junction. There Edward Hopper painted some of his best watercolor landscapes.

Cape Cod Afternoon, 1936, Carnegie Museum of Art

In 1939 he painted Cape Cod Afternoon – an image of an imaginary place he pieced together from bits and pieces in the vicinity. A doorway came from Orleans, the billowing grass from South Truro.

Isolation and Solitude

Gas, 1940, Museum of Modern Art

His paintings began to explore the themes of isolation and solitude: There were more small houses, more interiors, more lonely people. And he continued to invent. Gas, like Cape Cod Afternoon, was a pastiche of elements he’d seen and sketched in different places.

Cape Cod Morning, 1950, Smithsonian Museum of American Art

In the late 1940s his creative juices dried up, and he told a friend he wished he could paint because he was tired of reading and going to the movies. Edward Hopper did paint Cape Cod Morning in 1950 with Jo, as was often the case, posing as the woman in the window.

He suffered health problems in the 1950s and painted only about five paintings a year in the 1960s. Then on May 15, 1967, he died.

Jo bequeathed his work, more than 3,000 pieces, to the Whitney Museum of American Art. She died 10 months later.

With thanks to Edward Hopper’s New England by Carl Little. This story about Edward Hopper was updated in 2023.

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The Legend of Faneuil Hall’s Golden Grasshopper Weathervane

The truth is more interesting than the legend about the golden grasshopper perched above Faneuil Hall since 1742.

The real story links the golden grasshopper to tracts of land in Maine, includes a secret within its belly and a tale of theft and recovery.

The golden grasshopper

According to the legend, the golden grasshopper weathervane was a gift from coppersmith Shem Drowne to Peter Faneuil. Faneuil, a wealthy merchant and slave trader, donated Faneuil Hall to Boston.

Legend further has it that Shem Drowne got discouraged by his many failures in colonial New England. He lay down in an open field, and upon waking saw a boy chasing a grasshopper. Shem watched and talked with the boy, who took him home to his wealthy parents. They gave him dinner and later adopted him. The golden grasshopper weathervane commemorated that turning point in his life.

The Real Story

The real story? Above London’s Royal Exchange a grasshopper weathervane perched, recognized around the world as a symbol of commerce. (It’s still there.) Peter Faneuil Hall built his hall on Boston’s then-shoreline, and he no doubt intended it as a symbol of commerce, a beacon to ships that put into Boston Harbor.

Peter Faneuil

Faneuil Hall became a hub of commercial activity, a launching pad for independence from Britain and a center of abolitionism. As one historian put it,

In old Faneuil, that guild temple of traders and aldermen, butchers and clerks, hucksters and civic magistrates, the spirit of the people conceived an embryonic nation.

Shem Drowne

Shem Drowne was born Dec. 4, 1683 in Eliot, Maine. His father, Leonard Drowne, was a shipbuilder from England. The family left Maine for Boston in 1699 to escape violence following King William’s War.

Cover of souvenir album of historic sites of Boston, shaped as beanpot, with illus. of Faneuil Hall. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Shem Drowne married Katherine Clark on Sept. 18, 1712 in Boston. She inherited tracts of land in Maine known as the Pemaquid Patents. Shem gained power of attorney from the other heirs. He then went to court to eventually control what became known as the Drowne Claim, which encompassed Bristol, Bremen, Damariscotta, and parts of Newcastle and Nobleboro. In 1746, he bought Monhegan Island in Maine for 10 pounds, 13 shillings.

He was also a coppersmith and Boston’s first tinplate worker, with a shop in the North End.

In 1716, Shem Drowne made America’s first documented weathervane, a gilded archer on top of the royal governor’s house. He created a rooster weathervane for the New Brick Church on Hanover Street. (It now sits on top of First Church in Cambridge.) He also made the copper swallowtail banner vane atop Old North Church in Boston.

In 1742, he made the copper grasshopper weathervane with glass eyes for Faneuil Hall. It was later gilded.

‘I shall vary as the wind’

In 1755, an earthquake threw the golden grasshopper to the ground, severing a leg. Boston selectmen voted to pay Shem Drowne’s son Thomas to repair it. Thomas made a time capsule with the words ‘food for the grasshopper’ on it. He placed it in the grasshopper’s belly with a note:

To my brethren and fellow grasshoppers, Fell in ye year 1753 (1755) Nov. 13, early in ye morning by a great earthquake by my old Master above. Again, like to have met with Utter Ruin by Fire, by hopping Timely from my Public Station, came of the broken bones and much Bruised. Cured and Fixed. Old Master’s son Thomas Drowne June 28, 1768, and Though I will promise to Discharge my office, yet I shall vary as ye wind.

Messages From Mayors

Since then, the golden grasshopper has been periodically refurbished, and new items placed in the time capsule, including historical newspapers, coins, and messages from mayors.

Faneuil Hall 1789

The golden grasshopper became a symbol of Boston. According to another legend, three men who said they came from Boston asked for aid from Samuel Cooper, American consul in Glasgow. Cooper, a Bostonian, asked them what was on top of Faneuil Hall. One said a fish, one said a horse, the third said a grasshopper. He is alleged to have said to the third, “I will give you all the assistance you need, but the other men will have to walk to Boston.”

Shem Drowne died January 13, 1774.

The Golden Grasshopper Heist

Almost exactly 200 years later, someone stole the golden grasshopper. Paul Revere Carroll, a direct descendant of Paul Revere, was the police detective in charge of the case. He got a phone call from Plymouth County’s district attorney saying he had part of the grasshopper.

They met in Boston’s Park Square and the DA handed him a paper bag with the spire in it. He led police to the Faneuil Hall tower, where rags covered the rest of the golden grasshopper.

It turned out a steeplejeack who’d been arrested on drug charges had stolen it, but confessed to the crime in hopes of getting a plea bargain in his drug case. The grasshopper was regilded and replaced, but with a locking device so it couldn’t be stolen again.

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New from the New England Historical Society. Click here to order your copyt oday.
With thanks to Faneuil Hall and Faneuil Hall Market: Or, Peter Faneuil and His Gift by Abram English Brown. Color image of Faneuil Hall: By Tony Fischer. This story was updated in 2020.

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