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The Cruise of the Mystery, and Other Poems.
Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1886. 18mo (6.75” x 4.25”), printed buff wrappers. [i], 121 pp., 22 original watercolor illustrations. In a modern brown cloth clamshell box with black leather lettering pieces at spine, stamped in gold. First edition of Thaxter’s fourth volume of poems, embellished by the author with twenty-two original watercolors of flowers and other subjects drawn from nature. Signed “Celia Thaxter” on an endpaper and dated 1887. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835–1894) spent her childhood on the nearby Isles of Shoals, first on White Island, where her father was lighthouse keeper, and then on Appledore Island, where her father had built Appledore House Hotel. After marrying and living on the mainland—during which time she launched her literary career—she returned to Appledore for the warmer months, becoming hostess of the hotel. Living in a cottage next door where she cultivated her famed flower garden, Thaxter became the presiding spirit of one of the first artist colonies in the United States, welcoming to the island and her home such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Morris Hunt and others. Among those closest to her was impressionist painter Childe Hassam, who painted several portraits of Thaxter, and whose paintings of her garden are reproduced as chromolithographs in Thaxter’s An Island Garden, published in the last year of her life. A successful poet and essayist, Thaxter was also a gifted visual artist, taking lessons from Hassam and others, and focusing her skills on the illumination of copies of her books and the decoration of ceramics, transferring to both “the wonders and splendors of nature,” which she observed in her garden and elsewhere. The lovely volume offered here is a quintessential example of one of Thaxter’s illuminated books. It includes sixteen watercolors depicting flowers and other plants, three marine scene vignettes, and images of a spider in its web, two butterflies, and a peacock feather. Thaxter’s poems are laced with references to flowers and other aspects of nature, and each watercolor typically reflects the content of the poem it illustrates. The poppies gracing Schumann’s Sonata in A Minor, for instance, are inspired by the line “The scarlet poppies stand erect and tall” and the apple blossoms illustrating The Answer reflect the line “the blossoms blush on the bough.” Six of the watercolors in this volume are reproduced in Sharon Paiva Stephan’s One Woman’s Work : the Visual Art of Celia Laighton Thaxter (Portsmouth, 2001), courtesy of a previous owner. A marvelous example of one of Celia Thaxter’s hand-illuminated books. REFERENCES: BAL 19895; Stephan, Sharon Paiva. One Woman’s Work : the Visual Art of Celia Laighton Thaxter (Portsmouth, 2001), pp. 91-129. CONDITION: Very good, covers lightly soiled.
Item #5898
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