MURA · THE COLLECTION · CHILDE HASSAM

The Little Pond, Appledore

The Little Pond, Appledore is an oil painting by Childe Hassam from 1890, made on Appledore Island, the largest of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire. It measures 40.6 by 55.8 cm and belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago, which acquired it in 1986.

Childe Hassam · 1890 · Oil on canvas · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The catalogue entry describes wildflowers gathering around a little island pond beneath a wide, pale sky. Appledore, formerly known as Hog Island, lies about seven miles off the Maine coast and is part of the town of Kittery. The museum notes that the island was the home of the poet Celia Thaxter and drew artists and writers to its rocky shores in the late nineteenth century.

How it was painted

Hassam was born in Boston in 1859. After several years of study in Europe he returned to the United States in 1889 and settled in New York, and the museum says he painted this canvas during his first summer visit to Appledore. He applied the bright palette, broken brushwork and dramatic light effects of Impressionism to American landscapes. Social life on the island revolved around Thaxter's salon, where artists and writers gathered; Hassam later recalled spending some of his pleasantest summers there. His subjects included Thaxter's flower garden and the rocky landscape, and in Impressionist fashion he applied colours perfectly clear out of the tube to unprimed canvas without pre-mixing. Thaxter, who lived with her father at his Appledore Hotel, had earlier persuaded him to drop his first name and sign himself Childe Hassam.

Where it went

The painting was in a private collection by 1929, when it was shown at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in an exhibition covering Hassam's work from 1880 to 1919. It belonged to Lauren Jay Drake Jr. of Chicago by 1954, then passed by descent to his niece Theresa Mary Drake in San Francisco and to Dr. Gwendolyn Boyd in New Orleans in 1982. Hirschl and Adler Galleries in New York bought it in 1984 and sold it to Marshall Field of Chicago the same year; the Art Institute bought it from him in 1986, through the prior acquisition of the Friends of American Art and the Walter H. Schulze Memorial collections. It has since been lent to Childe Hassam, An Island Garden Revisited at Yale in 1990, to American Impressionism at the Thyssen-Bornemisza foundation in Lugano the same year, and to American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals in Raleigh and Salem in 2016.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Impressionist Life collection with a serene mood: a pond, wildflowers and a wide sky.