There’s something about the Isles of Shoals that sets them apart, making them loom larger than their footprint would suggest. The “Island Light, Isles of Shoals” exhibit at The Banks Gallery in Portsmouth, through Sept. 3, honors their outsized historic and artistic legacy and natural beauty offshore.

Leaving Portsmouth on an ebbing tide, past roiling surf and rocky underwater ledges, the nine small and nearly deserted islands lie astride the invisible intersection of Maine and New Hampshire. Of the show’s 100 paintings, 30 are 19th-century historical works, on loan from private collections and small museums.

That means probably a third of the painters represented in “Island Light” approached Star and Appledore and Smuttynose by wind, muscle or steam. The representations in their paintings feel dearly earned by this elemental contact. Wind and cloud, wave and reflection, sun and moon are ever present.

A day-long sail, north from Gloucester or south from Portland, results in an evening-ambered arrival as the sun goes down over the mainland, as in William Frederick De Haas’ (1830–1880) “From Appledore Island.” There’s a nice sense of arrival, the emotional sense of relief that comes at journey’s and day’s end. 

Conversely, the rocky coast, stone-buttressed shore and rough surf painted by John Appleton Brown (1844–1902) in “Appledore” could make any wooden hull feel vulnerable by comparison. Brown offers an overcast morning, a spot of sunlight peeping through, sea-gull spatter on spume-sprayed stone outcrops. As a viewer ashore you feel unassailable, in safe harbor.

Brown and DeHaas’ work keeps company with another style: a dark, limited palette with moon as singular light source, as in “Sailing by Moonlight” by Warren W. Shepard (1858-1937). Masterfully worked, an orange globe, aglow, defines the day’s last cumulus cloud. It highlights the surf break and silhouettes the spars, sail, rigging and rocks. A sentinel who shares the evening’s sail lurks in background shadow. You’ve a foot on the rock, and eye of the luff, your head in the cosmos. 

In John Christopher Miles’ (1837-1911) “Moonrise at the Isles of Shoals,” the lighthouse is rendered unnecessary as the moon unfurls a path of shimmer to your feet and an illumined wisp of stratus offers the moon a winged halo.

With dramatic vistas and sprawling beach roses, island light has long beckoned to painters, writers, poets and wanderers. In the mid-19th century, grand hotels on Appledore and Star islands hosted Boston Brahmins sailing from Boston to Portland.

Poet Celia Thaxter welcomed such writers as Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greanleaf Whittier to her salon on Star Island and painters such as William Morris Hunt (1824-1879) and Childe Hassam (1859–1935). Hassam and Thaxter’s 1894 collaboration, “An Island Garden,” brought his impressionistic flowers, landscapes and seascapes and Thaxter’s carefully wrought verses to audiences worldwide. Thanks to these painters and their students, “Every single major American museum has an Impressionist work of the Isles of Shoals,” curator Jamie LaFleur says.

Hassam’s contribution to “Island Light” is an odd one: “Appledore Sunrise,” is a smeary oil study on a cedar cigar box lid, more historic artifact than art object. Blues and grays make a watery, foggy foreground under a pinkish ‘red sky at morning, sailor take warning’ sky. A splotch of yellow, the almighty sun, is trying to burn it all off to reveal the day.

 --Rick Agran

Three hundred years after their heyday as fishing villages bustling with hundreds of Shoalers, innkeepers, sailors and constables, and more than 100 years after American Impressionism grew roots on the islands, Banks Gallery owner and painter Jamie LaFleur led 18 regional Impressionist-realist painters to the Isles of Shoals for a day of painting in April 2006.

They found little the modern world catalogs. There are no politics, no governments nor jobs, only elemental sky, sea and rock, with stone and wood buildings, graves and gardens as evidence of man’s attempt to put a claim on the land.

The painters’ journey wasn’t nearly as difficult as those their cultural ancestors made. For most, it was a first-ever visit, and their palettes luminous with a glorious April day, their results fill the gallery with light and color. The blues of ocean and sky, touched with pastel yellows and pinks and oranges, vividly illuminate the mysterious interplay between what’s in a landscape, how a shift in the light will alter it, and how our mind sees it. Sean Beavers captures this interplay in a spare view of sky, rock and water in “Over Looking Eastern Rocks.”  In “View From Wallace Sands” by Sally Ladd-Cole, the frame is nearly filled with an approaching wave, the tension, action and threat balanced by the safety of a lighthouse visible in the pink glow of day’s edge just within the top of the frame.

The painters visited before the usual summer boaters, conference attendees, researchers and handful of residents arrived, and there are very few figures here. Instead, the dwellings, outbuildings, lighthouses and ships figure prominently among the granite rocks and the sea that serve as their foundation. As in Barrett McDevitt’s intimate view of the uninviting “Rocks on Star Island,” with a weathered building in the background pinned under a gray sky, often these elements are nested together within the same frame, with the effect of creating an intimate portrait. Other times, such as in Ron Brown’s “White Island Light” and Louis Guarnaccia’s “Breaking Light,” the painters draw from their forebears’ darker palettes and dramatically distant perspective, filling the frame with moody sky and capturing the stormier aspects of the Isles of Shoals’ personality.

In April, many of the painters carried with them folders with copies of paintings made here in the 1880s by the iconic Childe Hassam.

“It was an introduction for almost all of them, and almost all of them have returned on their own, some two or three times, to paint,” LaFleur says.

The new work is priced between $700 and $40,000, with the highest price tag attached to a work by current N.H. Artist Laureate James Aponovich, who is creating a series of paintings set in significant Granite State locales. LaFleur plans three more historical-contemporary exhibits and books. The next will feature the Boston school, in November, followed by a Monhegan Island pairing next summer and a second edition of this spring’s White Mountains school show, “Visions in Granite,” which will take place in November and December of 2007.

--Karen Marzloff 

artists included in the exhibition
James Aponovich
Sean Beavers
Roberto Julio Bessin
Olaf Martinius Brauner (1869–1947)
Ron Brown
John Appleton Brown (1844–1902)
T. A. Charron
Tom Chase
William R. Davis
Cheri Dennett
Katherine Doyle
Robert Duffy
Dyann Fitzpatrick
Samuel Lancaster Gerry (1813–1891)
Tom Glover,
Mike Graves
Louis Guarnaccia
Grant Hacking
John Philip Hagen
Jennifer Hansen
Simon Harling
William Frederick De Haas
   (1830–1880)
Childe Hassam (1859–1935)
John Woodsum Hatch (1920–1998)
Marion Howard (1883 - 1953)
Elizabeth Johansson
Stapleton Kearns
Sally Ladd-Cole
Jamie H. LaFleur
Herbert S. Lourie (1923-1982)
James Laurier
Edmond Darch Lewis (1835–1910)
Barrett McDevitt
John Christopher Miles (1837–1911)
Addison Thomas Millar (1860–1913
Lisa Jelleme-Miller
Scott Moore
Kathy Morrissey
John Morrison
Dennis Perrin
Catherine Raynes
Warren W. Sheppard (1858–1937)
Sydney Sparrow
Dahl Taylor
Anthony Tomaselli
Charles Herbert Woodbury (1864–1940)