Celia Thaxter's Gardens, Isles of Shoals, Maine
by HASSAM, Childe, Oil on canvas, 45 x 55 cm
Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835-1894) was an American writer of poetry and stories. As the hostess of her father’s hotel, the Appledore House on Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals, she welcomed many New England literary and artistic notables to the island and to her parlor, including writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the artists William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam, who painted several pictures of her.