Watercolor on cream wove paper, 1958. 432x559 mm; 17x22 inches. Signed and dated in watercolor, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, New York; thence by descent to the current owner.
Exhibited: Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, September 24 - November 27, 1988, with the label on the frame back.
In this watercolor, Palmer Hayden revisits a landscape where thirty years earlier he began his painting career. During the summers of 1925-1926, Palmer Hayden was lent the use of a cottage in Boothbay, Maine, and arranged to exchange labor for instruction, room and board at the Commonwealth Art Colony. He painted around Portland and Haverstraw on the weekends. He showed many of these first landscapes and marine studies in his first solo exhibition at the Civic Club, New York, in April of 1926. In December, his oil painting of Boothbay Harbor won the Harmon Foundation prize, beating out the other finalist Hale Woodruff, and ultimately gained him passage to Paris. Leininger-Miller, pp. 71-72.
