Art: The Evening Star 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, planets 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 “The Evening Star,” in honor of his romance with Thaxter. In the pastel, Hassam represents not the bright full moon but the early rising of the planet Venus. Yet his restrained palette and rapid strokes conjure the verse’s “mists of time,” representing a subliminal space between day and night.
Many thought the image looks like the moon; however, it is the evening star, Venus. The bright spot and reflection are too 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.
Hassam was 24 years younger than Thaxter, but there was a spark nonetheless.
Frederick Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.
Celia Laighton Thaxter was an American poet whose work centred thematically on the islands and ocean of her youth. Celia Laighton grew up in New Hampshire. On Appledore Island her father operated a successful resort hotel that included among its guests Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry David Thoreau, William Morris Hunt, Childe Hassam, Lucy Larcom, and Sarah Orne Jewett. In 1851 she married Levi L. Thaxter, who had been her father’s business partner. They settled in Newtonville, Massachusetts, in 1856.
Henry E. Hooper 