The paintings of French Impressionist Claude Monet provided ample precedent for the subject and technique of Hassam’s images of the cliffs and coves of the isles of Shoals. In the 1880s and 1890s Monet visited French seaside tourist resorts such as Étretat where he painted serial views of rock outcropping along the coast.

Hassam who studied in France in 1886 and was an avid museum goer at home or abroad had many opportunities to view Monet’s work. Like Monet, Hassam enjoyed the challenge of disclosing infinite variety in a single subject painted many times in differing lights and aspects.

The scholar, David Park Curry, believes that Hassam’s late period watercolor renderings of the coastline of the Isles of Shoals, including The Cove, were among his most dynamic interpretations of that theme. Curry explained that although these watercolor images referred to specific places, they were abstract in design and seemed “to capture the very ethos of craggy rock and limpid water.” ¹

1. David Park Curry, “The Rocks of Appledore,” Childe Hassam, An Island Garden Revisited, Denver Art Museum, 1990, p. 189.