Foreword by Edward Deci

Gardiner, Maine: Tilbury House Publishers

196 pp., $30, softcover

A neat representational style that loosened up

If memory serves, I first came across a Triscott watercolor in the dining room of the Trailing Yew bed and breakfast on my first visit to Monhegan Island about ten years ago. I recall being impressed by the artist’s representational skill and his grasp of Monhegan life and landscape.

A little more knowledge of Samuel Peter Rolt Triscott (1846-1927) was gained while editing Monhegan: The Artists’ Island (1995). According to authors Will and Jane Curtis, the British-born gentleman was the first painter to live year-round on this remote Maine island (Rockwell Kent, Andrew Winter and a few other hardy souls would follow suit).

Earle Shettleworth completes the portrait of Triscott in this handsome and very manageable coffee table book, which features numerous color plates and vintage photographs. In his usual meticulous manner, the indefatigable director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission relates the circumstances that led to the monograph’s creation, from the discovery of some of the artist’s glass plate negatives of Monhegan in 1992 to a viewing of the Malone collection of Triscott paintings in 2000.

Shettleworth’s personal interest lies primarily in the photographs the painter took of the island; almost half the book is devoted to this part of Triscott’s oeuvre. Of particular interest is the fascinating relationship of photography to painting. Many pairings highlight the ways in which the artist worked directly from photographs (interesting to note that a critic once described a Triscott painting as being “hopelessly literal and painfully conscientious,” perhaps a result of his photographic eye).

An appreciative essay by the late Richard H. Malone, a collector and champion of Triscott’s artwork, serves as the main text. Numerous citations from reviews serve as testimony to the painter’s stature. At times, the essay suffers from what might be called Homer envy (George Havens’s biography of Frederick Waugh, another painter associated with Monhegan, displays the same flaw). Malone valiantly attempts to prove that Triscott taught the American how to paint in watercolor, a fact not found in any of the Homer literature, including Helen Cooper’s comprehensive study.

Triscott brought a sure hand to the traditional English watercolor technique, handling the medium with control and for the most part favoring the subdued palette of his brethren. The critics of his day had the painter pegged just right, calling him “the most punctilious watercolorist” and “the most able aquarellist in America.” Despite Triscott’s evident skills, Donelson Hoopes didn’t include him in his landmark American Watercolor Painting (1977), preferring artists more daring and distinctive in their style and choice of subject matter.

That said, Triscott turned out many a memorable watercolor and canvas (a few of his oils are reproduced). Going by the fine reproductions, one traces the evolution of a neat representational style that loosened up when the artist arrived in Maine. In addition to Monhegan, Mount Desert, Ogunquit and other coastal Maine motifs, there are panoramic views of river valleys in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and delicate watercolors of England and France. Outstanding among the Monhegan sheets are several winter landscapes, which must stand among the first ever painted of the island at this time of the year (a Triscott letter describing the raw conditions on the island in the off-season is reprinted in the back of the book).

In an act of rediscovery that in some ways surpasses An Eye For the Coast: The Maritime and Monhegan Island Photographs of Eric Hudson (1998), Shettleworth and company once again resurrect the past in a memorable manner. I, for one, await with keen anticipation the next installment.

The Monhegan Museum is currently showing a major Triscott exhibition, which runs through September 30, 2002. The exhibition will travel to the Portland Museum of Art.

Carl Little’s The Art of Maine in Winter will be published by Down East Books in the fall.