Poppies, Isles of Shoals

Childe Hassam

National Gallery of Art

We look across a profusion of vivid red, blush-pink, and white flowers lining a stony shoreline in this almost square landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted so some details are indistinct, especially the blossoms of the flowers, which are dabs of pink and red. The flowers have long, sage-green stems shaded with flicks of navy blue. The field of flowers covers the bottom third of the composition, and a vibrant green and blue bush peeks in from the right edge of the painting. Beyond the field of flowers is a powder-blue body of water with low, rocky formations, like giant, shallow boulders rolling across the surface of the water. The rocks are painted in shades of white tinged with pink, blue, and green with daubs of rust orange along their edges. An outcropping farther in the distance to our left is carpeted with patches of pea green and canary yellow. One rock formation in the middle of the composition almost spans the width of the painting. Beyond it is a small boat with white sails drifting on the water. In the deep distance is another long finger of oyster-white land stretching across the left half of the horizon, which comes two-thirds of the way up the composition. A lone bird flies through the milk-white sky that fills the top third of the scene. Some patches along the bottom edge of the painting are beige, where the canvas on which this is painted is visible. The artist signed and dated the lower left, “Childe Hassam 1891.”