One Woman's Work: The Visual Art of Celia Laighton Thaxter

Rating:
Summary: Art of Shoals
Review: According to Sharon Paiva Stephan, the talents of 19th-century artist, businesswoman and writer Celia Laighton Thaxter will always find readers and viewers. It was her special skills at gardening, turning commonly used objects into works of art, throwing parties, and writing. As ONE WOMAN'S WORK says, Thaxter could, just as well, grow flowers, paint them onto china, put them in vases, or turn them into poetry.

Other than a semester at Mt Washington Female Seminary in Boston, Thaxter learned what she knew by home schooling and by painting lessons with Boston Impressionist Childe Hassam. Just plain observing nature also had a lot to do with her delicately detailed style. She was often seen carrying magnifying glasses and sketchbooks. The sketches usually showed up later in her book illustrations and her hand-painted china designs of olive branches, poppies, scarlet pimpernel and seaweed.

Also, Thaxter's sketches probably joggled her memory for writing. AN ISLAND GARDEN ended up among the best autobiographical garden books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That work alone grouped her with respected women garden writers Helena Rutherford Ely, Mrs Francis King, Anna B Warner, and Louise Beebe Wilder.

Thaxter moved into gardening and writing naturally, out of admiration for John Audubon. She was an early protector of endangered birds. Because of what she did and wrote, much of the Isles of the Shoals, off coastal Maine, became bird sanctuaries. Specifically, Appledore island, where she ran a successful hotel business, became a summer research spot managed by Cornell and New Hampshire universities.

Her garden of mainly Burpee and Dreer seeds was destroyed by fire in 1914. Not destroyed was the garden information in Hassam's paintings, many old photographs, and Thaxter's writings. So John M Kingsbury of Cornell University brought back, in time for the United States Bicentennial, the Thaxter garden of asters, hollyhocks, larkspurs, lilies, love-in-a-mist, mignonette, sweet rocket, verbenas, and wildflowers.

During her life Thaxter's garden kept on going, beyond the sweet pea-covered fence, in one direction up vine-covered walls, into the house. There every spacetop had vases, each with 1-2 blossoms. In another direction poppy seeds were left, unweeded after May, to bloom wildly down the bank right to the sea's edge!

Late 19th-century dress tended towards colors too. But Celia Laighton Thaxter stood out in blacks, grays or whites. Photographs in the garden often showed her covered up in a white duster. For other such information, and an even more personal portrait, there's Julia Older's ISLAND QUEEN and Rosamond Thaxter's SANDPIPER.