Art: Venus by Hassam
Childe Hassam is an American artist who spend much time at Appledore House on the Isles of Shoals, off the New Hampshire coast in the North Atlantic. He developed a “close working relationship” there with a poet named Celia Thaxter. She wrote a sonnet in honor of Hassam, that talked about the magnificence of the moon, sun and sky. The sonnet is as follows:
A crescent with its glory just begun
A spark from the great central fires sublime
A crescent that shall orb into the sun
And burn in splendor through the mists of time.
Childe Hassam drew this pastel image in honor of his romance with Thaxter. In the pastel, Hassam represents not the bright full moon but the early rising planet Venus. Yet his restrained palette and rapid strokes conjure the verse’s “mists of time,” representing a subliminal space between day and night.
The image looks a lot like the evening star, Venus, and it is too certainly small to be the moon. After all, yes, Venus is the evening and the morning star. It is also the name of the Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire and fertility. Venus is the counterpart to the Greek goddess Aphrodite and is famously the mother of Aeneas, the ancestor of the Roman people. Venus was considered the embodiment of love and sexuality, often depicted alongside her son with the bow and arrow of love, Cupid.
Celia and Childe must have felt the power of the gods.
Henry E. Hooper 