In her mid-40s, writer Celia Thaxter visited European museums, and on her return she decided to winter over in Boston for painting lessons. The following summer she invited a new prot?g?, artist Frederick Childe Hassam, to her artist colony on the Isles of Shoals. Hassam set up his easel behind the hop vines on her verandah and sketched in her small but prolific garden.

In 1890, Celia had such a severe attack of neuralgia that she was ordered to rest. Freed from responsibility at the family-owned Appledore Hotel, she began a journal about the "precious children" in her garden. Frederick stopped by one day to show her some of his latest watercolors. Seeing how easily Hassam captured the reflective ocean light, Celia was struck by something Harriet Beecher Stowe once said: "Everything that ought to happen is going to happen." Then and there, she realized her journal would be her next book, "An Island Garden," and standing before her was just the man to do the illustrations.

This June on my way to an exhibit of Hassam's paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, I pictured the young artist and his famous hostess toasting their collaboration with the champagne Celia kept at her bedside (doctor's orders).

I was feeling a bit heady myself. The anthology I'd put together of Thaxter's "Selected Writings" with a cover painting of "Celia Thaxter in her Garden" by Hassam was at the museum, and I was invited to the press preview.

Thaxter attracted a number of up-and-coming talents and not only championed their work but also used her considerable influence to further their careers. Soon after they met, Celia discovered Hassam's middle name was "Childe" and mentioned it certainly would sell more paintings than "Frederick." From then on the artist signed his paintings "Childe." Thaxter's fame was well established, and their book instantly became a bestseller. In the wake of Celia's death, Childe quit his day job as an illustrator, set up a studio and painted full time.

At the Met I joined the troop of city reporters scribbling on notepads and flashing digital cameras. We moved through Hassam's prolific career, from student sketches in Paris through the Isles of Shoals Room, and culminating in his popular New York City "Flag" series painted during WW I.

The resurgence of interest in Childe Hassam as a forerunner of American Impressionism is long overdue. This exhibit gathers paintings from museums and private collections across the country for the first time since the Met show in 1972. It was obvious that Hassam was in his element painting water-whether a wet Paris street after a downpour or a snaking rural rivulet along a country road.

He was forever painting the seaside towns of Gloucester, Newport and Cos Cob. But Hassam's true kinetic strength as an artist drew me back to the Shoals Room and some wondrous discoveries.

Those of you familiar with the facsimile edition of "An Island Garden" (Houghton Mifflin, 1984; the original was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1894) are in for a real treat at this show. The old-fashioned chromolithography prints on off-white paper don't do justice to Hassam's original light-suffused paintings. In the originals, Celia, her flowers, and the sea are saturated in bright glowing color. And although Hassam is no figure painter, he paints his island muse in such a charming light that we can't take our eyes off her.

About a decade after Celia was buried on Appledore, Childe Hassam returned to the Shoals and brought away some of his boldest and best paintings. In "Jelly-fish," "The Cove" and "The Gorge," his depth perspective is so dramatic you feel like you're poised on the edge, ready to dive into the limpid water below. Tiny dots of stiff white watercolor paper glint through Hassam's bold brush strokes, turning the waves into glinting jewels.

A tenth of Hassam's paintings were done at the Shoals. Celia poses for a few of his sketches, while another of her parlor is cluttered mainly with easels, tapestries, wall paintings and flowers. There is one life-size portrait of a pianist in a white gown with her back to us, drooping in exhaustion. Over the piano Hassam has painted a picture of the Shoals, and although "The Sonata" wasn't painted there, it's reminiscent of Celia's parlor. Composer Edward MacDowell was a frequent guest, and it's likely his young wife Marion regaled Shoals guests with her prowess as a concert pianist. More than a decade later, taking Celia's lead, she founded The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, which continues to provide creative time and space for hundreds of artists and writers every year.

Ironically, as the reputations of Edward MacDowell and Childe Hassam grew, their generous mentor was forgotten. When asked how such a popular author could lapse into obscurity, I cite the introduction to "An Island Garden." It's a prime example of what happens to talented women like Celia. The man who wrote the 1984 introduction to "An Island Garden" cautions readers "they can only be disappointed if they seek out Celia's poems and other writings." This edition remains in libraries across the country, although I'm happy to report Tasha Tudor has since written a new introduction to "An Island Garden." After my novel "The Island Queen" came out, people kept asking where they could find Celia's books; they had looked everywhere. The interest compelled me to reach back and bring this neglected writer forward once more.

Seeing Celia at the Hassam exhibit (through Sept. 12) reminds me how important it is for everyone interested in the arts to join her circle of matronage (to coin a concept) and mentoring. Perhaps one of the most pivotal gifts Celia gave New England was her generous support of younger artists. Not all of us own a seaside salon, but for most struggling artists, an elegant dinner, a few influential friends and acknowledgment of their talent tends to go a long way.

Julia Older has been a writer-in-residence at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, and her work has appeared in 175 publications-including "Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose And Poetry About Nature (with Celia Thaxter)." Her latest book is "Nature Walks Along the Seacoast" (co-authored with Steve Sherman, AMC Books 2003).