Etchings & Prints
"AN ISLAND GARDEN" CELIA THAXTER" Pictures & Illuminations Childe Hassam, 1894
With Pictures and Illuminations by Childe Hassam, 1st Edition, 1894
Celia Thaxter. An Island Garden. First Edition. Illuminations by Childe Hassam. Bos/NY: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1894. 4to. viii, 126 pp. Green cloth Art Nouveau floral design (poppies) on both covers by Sarah Wyman Whitman. Binding lightly soiled, very small 2" – 3" tear to cover starting inside front cover. Author's gardens on the Isle of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire. 12 color plates after watercolors by Hassam + 10 other color illustrations.
Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835-1894) was born in Portsmouth, NH, and when she was four her father became the lighthouse keeper on White Island, Isles of Shoals, NH.
Nearly sixty years later, having spent most of her life on and around these islands, she published An Island Garden, a memoir about her many years of experience as a gardener. In beautifully detailed prose infused with a passion for nature and a wonderful sense of humor, Thaxter invites readers to notice, as she does, the changing of seasons, the birds and insects that threaten and sustain her plants, and the flowers that "have been like dear friends to me, comforters, and inspirers, powers to uplift and to cheer."
Published in 1894, An Island Garden featured color illustrations by Childe Hassam, the American impressionist artist who spent many summers at the Isles of Shoals, painting their rocky coastlines and wild hillsides. One of Hassam's favorite subjects was Thaxter's garden, and more than twenty of his illuminations and full-page scenes illustrate An Island Garden. Completing this treasure of late nineteenth-century textual and visual art is the exquisite cover design by Sarah Wyman Whitman. Whitman was one of the principal artist-designers for Houghton-Mifflin, and her Art Nouveau covers appear strikingly fresh today. Whitman's predilection for floral motifs reveals the organicism of Art Nouveau, while her frequent use of soft-edged, ribbon-style banners hearkens back to the feminine ornament of an earlier generation.