Object of the Month

Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site has a large museum collection consisting of thousands of objects, many of which are not regularly displayed in the house's furnished exhibit rooms. Every month, an object will be featured on this page, providing a look at an unusual piece from the collection.

 

With the advent of summer’s warmer temperatures in New England, many people head for some of its beautiful beaches. This scene of Sandy Beach in Cohasset, Massachusetts was painted by Winckworth Allan Gay probably sometime between 1851 and 1870.

Born in Hingham, Massachusetts in 1821, Gay began studying drawing while attending West Point in the 1830s. A trip to Europe in 1847 led to a multi-year stay in Paris, where he was influenced by the Barbizon school painters and began to develop his own style. Within five years of his return to the U.S. in 1851, Gay had established a reputation as a well-known and respected landscape painter. He spent the next two decades focused on producing landscapes of coastal scenes near his home in Hingham, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and other New England locales. Sandy Beach in Cohasset, with its prominent rock outcroppings flanking an expanse of white sand, was a common subject of his. In 1873 Gay traveled again to Europe, and to Egypt. After another period back in the U.S., he embarked on his most ambitious trip, visiting Japan, which proved to be a rich source of material for his work, India, and then Europe again.

The Longfellow family purchased many of Gay’s paintings. Five of those, including this piece, are still in the Longfellow House collection. In his journals Henry Wadsworth Longfellow records having dinner with Gay multiple times, at his own home and those of other Longfellow family members. At least two of Gay’s paintings were donated by Ernest Longfellow, the poet’s second son and an artist himself, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gay had a close relationship with Thomas Gold Appleton, the well-known art patron, Boston society member, and brother-in-law to Henry W. Longfellow. Upon his death in 1884 Appleton bequeathed some of his collection of Gay’s paintings to his Longfellow nieces and nephews, and left Gay ten thousand dollars which enabled him to retire from painting in 1890 and live comfortably until his own passing in 1910. This beach scene is thought to have been in Henry W. Longfellow’s home during his life, and was being displayed by his daughter Alice in the house's dining room in 1912.

 

Click here to view past Objects of the Month.