Fort Gorges and Spring Point Light from Fort Preble. South Portland, Maine. March 21, 2018. The First day of Spring.. ENE from 43.649332 x -70.225533. Ink and watercolor 3.5 x 10.5 inches.

In searching for spectacular seaside vistas, one is often rewarded for their efforts by scaling the ramparts of seacoast fortifications. Overlooking waterways, these structures were built at strategic locations to afford maximum visibility. Delineating a physical and moral boundary between life and death, military defenses exploit advantageous conditions of terrain such as bluffs, swamps, rivers and streams. The introduction of gunpowder artillery in the fourteenth century rendered obsolete medieval motte-and-bailey castles, as well as the gated circuit-walls that enclosed urban centers since antiquity. The development of bastioned star-forts with outworks forced burghers to raze portions of their towns to lay down new street-systems allowing for the rapid movement of men, ordnance and materiel from one salient point to another.

Comte Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban.  (1633-1707) A new system of fortification. Vauban’s innovations led to the development of city planning and landscape architecture.

This gave rise to modern urban planning. Civil engineering techniques developed for the construction of gunpowder defenses combined moving large quantities of earth with impact-resistant masonry that found peacetime employment in the construction of formal gardens and city parks. The appearance of viable gunboats in the sixteenth century posed viable threats to landside targets.Seacoast forts were placed at the mouth of a harbor, on islands and at various point from which all could lay down overlapping fields of fire. This is the case with the historic defenses of Portland, Maine. During the nineteenth century, the city’s colonial batteries were augmented with new installations. The city had not always been so well defended.

Civil War-era map/chart of Portland, Maine and surrounding islands. New fortifications include Fort Gorges (white) Fort Scammel (blue) and Fort Preble (red).

Sailing into the Harbor on October 18, 1775, a small squadron of the Royal Navy under the command of Lieutenant Henry Mowat delivered an ultimatum to the residents of Portland, then known as Falmouth, Massachusetts. In retaliation for his humiliating capture by local militia he preceding may, Mowat ordered the settlement burned to the ground. Smarting from the lesson as Portland grew, coastal fortifications were established on the landside, and several harbor islands, making it one of the best-defended seaports in New England. Forts Sumner and Allen on Monroy Hill guarded the northeastern end of the city. Their guns corresponded with fields of fire laid down by Civil-War-era Fort Scammel, built on a rocky ledge at the north end of Falmouth Channel. Fort Preble sits at the northern tip of South Portland, across the channel from a small island defended by Fort Gorges. Further south on the landside beside Portland Head lighthouse, Fort Williams faces Fort Levett on Cushing’s Island. Downeast native Brigadier-General Seth Eastman produced canvases of Forts Scammel and Gorges as part of a painting commission for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Military Affairs. Not only those with an interest in military architecture, but anyone yearning for the satisfaction of magisterial vistas should visit historic fortifications. Chosen to command as much of the visible terrain as possible, these positions frequently overlook sweeping vistas. Landscape theorist John Brinckerhoff Jackson observed that as physical memories of failed endeavors, ruins admonish us to do better.

Seth Eastman (1808-1875) Fort Scammel and Fort Gorges. Oil on canvas. 24 x 36 inches. 1872. Collection U.S. Senate. Location: U.S. Capitol, Washington DC. For dramatic effect, Eastman has radically compressed the distance between Fort Scammel in the foreground, and Fort Gorges beyond it.

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White Mountains Compositions by Asher B. Durand and John Frederick Kensett. Pen and watercolor on Moleskine watercolor (landscape) sketchbook. 3.5 x 10.5 inches. 2021

Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886)
White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. Oil on canvas

John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872)
The White Mountains from Shelburne, New Hampshire.
Oil on canvas ca 1850-1860.
SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA

Before museums came into existence, an art student’s first encounter with landscape painting occurred by looking at prints. Prior to the invention of photography, engravings and etchings functioned as virtual reality. Paintings of scenic vistas were reproduced for popular consumption as black-and-white prints, that sometimes were hand-colored. Before art-students were allowed to draw live models, they were required to copy prints before advancing to drawing plaster casts of famous statues. Because most educated people received as much instruction in drawing as they did in writing, a basic level of proficiency in drawing might be expected. Today we have fallen behind. The drawings illustrated above are analyses of White Mountain compositions by Asher B. Durand and John Kensett. Both men worked as print-engravers before devoting themselves to painting full-time. They would have been keenly aware of Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis. Published almost a hundred years after Claude’s death, the prints laid the groundwork for abstraction by making the composition the subject of each picture, as much as what was depicted. The journal-drawings above employ a technique rooted in antiquity that carried on through the Medieval period. Images were sketched out lightly with a red earth pigment were then elaborated in black, leaving a warm glow under the black lines. Updating that process, these drawings were mapped out using quadrants and thirds. Using orange Sakura Micron pens, the images were plotted and then further defined with a sepia fine-point Micron pen. Durand’s tonal scheme was explored en grisaille, while Kensett’s simultaneous contrasts of warm, cool, light and dark were investigated with black and yellow-ochre washes. This page spread was created for my forthcoming book Sketchbook Traveler: New England, due to be released by Schiffer Publishing in Autumn, 2022.

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La Chute Falls. Ticonderoga, New York. May 24, 2021. Looking west from: 43.749520 x -73.419157. 17:15h

Moving overland through the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont one finds the northeastern extremity of the Hudson watershed. Rising from its source near Dorset in southern Vermont, the Battenkill River flows into the Hudson River opposite Schuylerville. Thirty miles to the north is the southernmost part of the Saint Lawrence drainage-basin. Nestled within a slim declivity between two mountain ranges, the waters of Lake George descend by way of the La Chute River, a three-and-a-half-mile channel that tumbles over falls and rapids for two hundred and thirty feet before spilling into Lake Champlain beneath the walls of Fort Ticonderoga. Fifteen miles to the north, Crown Point had for centuries marked the boundary between Abenaki (Algonquin) lands to the east and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) territory to the west. Because of their strategic importance as defensible choke points in the water route between Montreal and New York, Crown Point and Ticonderoga were heavily fortified during the French and Indian War (1754–63) and the American Revolutionary War (1775–83).

Fort Ticonderoga from Mount Defiance. 40 degrees ESE from 43.8345644 x -75.405923. May 26, 2021. 14:30h

The summit today is accessible by automobile. A token obtained from the ticket-gate at Fort Ticonderoga raises the barrier to a vertiginous climb up the narrow blacktop road. One marvels at how in less than a day Burgoyne’s pioneers and artillerymen had manhandled heavy guns up these slopes. As I was packing up to depart, high winds churned through the foliage, straining the tree-branches from which were ripped fistfuls of leaves. Thundering black clouds rolled up the lake, dragging thick grey rain-sheets in their wake. Peppering the summit of Mount Defiance with a few drops, the storm battered Vermont farm-fields a few miles to the east.
A puff of white smoke appeared beside the citadel, followed by a sound like a cat passing wind; the distant report of a cannon.

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La Chute Falls. Ticonderoga, New York. May 24, 2021. 5:15 PM. Looking west from: 43.749520 x -73.419157

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Camel’s Hump Mountain, Vermont, from Lee Park Hill. Westport, NY. May 12, 2021

 Traveling south with an Abenaki war-party, Samuel de Champlain’s canoe traversed a large body of water known to his bellicose companions as Pitawbagok, or “the water between the lands.” Their Mohawk enemies to the south called it Kaniatarakwà: ronte, or “the bulging lake.” Noting a peak rising to the east, the explorer named it Leon Couchant, or “resting lion.” The Abenaki called it Moziozagan, or “moose shoulder,” which in English morphed into “Camel’s Hump,” in honor of a beast whose natural habitat was thousands of miles away. Disparity in elevation between its summit and the land from which it rises allows the peak to be recognizable at a great distance; a landmark for travelers since a time immemorial. The geological term for its unusual shape is roche moutonée, an allusion to mutton-fat as an adhesive used by wearers of powdered wigs. During the last Ice Age, ten thousand feet of ice passed over the massive rock. Immense pressure smoothed its upstream face, carving away the downstream side to leave a steeper slope in its wake. All of New England’s mountain-ranges were subjected to this process, including those of coastal Maine. Mapping the orientation of these asymmetrical formations allow us to reconstruct different flow-patterns within the Laurentide ice-sheet. Camel Hump has become an iconic symbol of the Green Mountains. Celebrated by Hudson River School painters, stunning vistas reward a relatively easy three-hour hike to the summit.

John Frederick Kensett. Camel’s Hump from the Western Shor of Lake Champlain. 1852. High Museum of Art, Atlanta. GA (reproduced under Fair Use, etc.)

My view of the mountain was taken from a hilly corner of Lee Park in Westport, New York.   A similar prospect was adopted by John Frederick Kensett in 1852. One can see that he took tremendous liberties in portraying the vista in scale, greatly exaggerating the size of the distant peak.  Cherishing verisimilitude, contemporary realists frequently embrace a benighted understanding of historical artworks as reporting visual data with accuracy. In fact the opposite is true. The job of art was to improve on nature. Failing to do so was dismissed as mere imitation. Kensett’s point of view would have been within a few hundred yards of my position.

View of Camel’s Hump and Lake Champlain. NW from Lee Park Hill (44.1839 x -73.3447). March 27, 2021. 4:31 PM,

The panoramic photograph above hardly resembles my memory of the scene. Nor would it have given much satisfaction to Kensett. Equipped with a better camera and more judicious lens options, a far more satisfactory result might have been achieved. Regardless of technology, still photography faces an uphill struggle to attain the complexity of human experience. Cinema stands a better chance. Here’s why.
Looking at individual features of terrain, we adjust our vision, zooming in and out, scanning the vista to collect bits of information to be filed away on the hard-drive. Drawing on these memories to reconstruct the scene, the relative size of one thing or another becomes less important than experiential conditions such as space, light, distance and proximity. Thus Kensett’s painting is a faithful reprise of the experience of looking at Camel’s Hump from Westport, unfettered by facts and data. One of the key differences between painting and photography is how either process is shaped by memory. The camera does not see things as we see them. It may take dozens of exposures to capture something that resonates with the photographer’s experience. In drawing and painting, even if we think that we are working from observation, in fact we are always working from memory. One looks at the subject, then turns to the page to make a mark. One looks at the mark, and then studies the subject. Casting our gaze back to the page we remember the subject. Looking back at the subject we remember the page. Because drawing from observation is working from memory, the challenge is not just to report the facts we behold, but to portray our memory of them.

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Cape Ann: Thatcher Island Lights from Long Beach. Thursday April 12, 2012

Few subjects invite more derision from self-identified serious painters than lighthouses and fishing-shacks, both of which Cape Ann has in abundance. Great artists like Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer and Fitz Henry Lane were undaunted by these pastiches, perhaps because they found more personal ways to confront them. During a visit to Cape Ann in the spring of 2012, we decided to seek accommodations along its Atlantic coast. Long Beach is a fishhook-shaped strip of sandy shoreline perhaps two miles in length, behind which stands in two ranks a row of seasonal homes. We stayed in the motel tucked in a cover at the southern end of the beach, in a modest room with a kitchen. Starting at the parking-area, a pedestrian walkway stretched northward between the beach and the houses, most of which would be vacant until Memorial Day. At the far end of the strand a stream flowed across the beach, dumping its waters into the ocean. Blowing in from the sea, a cold wind greeted our return to the warm room where we prepared our supper. Daybreak revealed beneath dark clouds the low profile of Thatcher’s Island with its twin lighthouses, silhouetted against a rosy horizon.

New design for the Thacher Island light-towers. Drawing by Captain William Buel Franklin (1823-1903). A graduate of West Point, Franklin became a member of the elite Corps of Topographical Engineers. He took part in the survey of the Great Lakes and saw action during the Mexican War. In 1857 he was put in charge of lighthouse construction along the New England coast. In 1859 he was made engineer for construction of the U.S. Capitol dome. During the Civil War he achieved the rank of Major General.

Violent storms off the coast of Cape Ann frequently drove ships onto Londoner Ledge, which in 1635 took twenty-one lives aboard the unlucky Watch and Wait. Only two survived. Anthony and Elizabeth Thacher found refuge on a nearby island, which the colonial government awarded them as recompense for their losses. Bequeathed to their descendants, the island was purchased by the colony for the purpose of setting up a pair of lighthouses. As an aid to navigation the towers were built along a north-south axis. The beacons first were lit in 1771. Four years later a detachment of minutemen shut them down. Following the cessation of hostilities the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ceded Thacher’s Island to the federal government. Lighthouse operations resumed in 1793. In 1861, a new pair of towers took their place. As the sun rose behind them one cold April morning, they seemed to signal both hope and danger.

Nautical chart showing Emerson Point, Oak Rock, Thacher’s Island, Londoner Ledge and Milk Island; treacherous waters in fog or bad weather. With tides at time in excess of nine feet, miscalculating the combined effect of currents, winds and tides expose mariners to calamity, in the form of rocky ledges lurking beneath the waves.

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Salem Harbor. Derby’s Wharf

Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather regarded the wild spaces of New England as the domain of Satan, and his fellow Puritans as agents of Divine Will, winning for Christendom dominion over a spiritual desert inhabited by savage heathens. As the promoter of an early Smallpox vaccine, Mather was deeply interested in science and learning. At the same time, he praised the Salem witch-trials that took the lives of nineteen men and women. His moral struggle between faith, science and superstition would be reconciled by a later generation during The Enlightenment.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

Haunted by the events of 1692-1693, witnesses to the mass-hysteria found way to deflect their shame and outrage. Salem Village changed its name to Danvers in 1752. In recent times Salem has profited from Wiccan tourism and a lively Halloween industry. Astride a crescent moon, a life-sized bronze statue of Bewitched actress Elizabeth Montgomery was installed along a pedestrian walkway. Visitors to Gallows Hill would pass by unknowing the rocky wooded rise where the executions actually took place. Curious to visit the site, it was troubling to find Proctor’s Ledge wedged in behind the drive-through lane of a Walgreen’s drugstore. Here the gallows once stood, not on the hill behind it. One year and two months after this photograph was taken, a memorial to the victims was dedicated near the eastern end of the ledge along modern-day Pope Street, amid fissures in the rock where the corpses had been dumped.

Looking east from Proctor Street toward Pope Street. Walgreens on the left.
Proctor’s Ridge on the right. 4:30 pm. April 15, 2016

Proctors Ledge Memorial. Dedicated June 19, 2017.

Salem struggled through the eighteenth century. Its fishery suffered during the French and Indian War and during the American War of Independence, when privateering helped to develop a maritime economy that would later evolve into profitable merchant fleets.

Map of Salem 1820

Situated at the base of a forked spit of land dividing Massachusetts Bay from the Danvers River, a tidal estuary formed by a confluence of creeks that drain the surrounding low-lying hills, Salem profited from trade in molasses, rum and slaves. Following the American war of independence, Salem established shipping routes to the far east.
Embarking for the Orient, merchantmen rounded Cape Horn before sailing to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Otter-pelts and other exotic furs prized by Chinese buyers were traded for silks, tea, and porcelains. During the Napoleonic Wars, Salem ships called at Nagasaki, as proxies for the Dutch East India Company. By the early nineteenth century Salem had grown to become the sixth largest city in the new republic, and the wealthiest. A consortium of sea-captains and ship owners in 1799 established the East India Marine Society to preserve in a museum natural and cultural curiosities collected on their voyages.

East Asia Marine Society Hall precursor to the Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

Like Peale’s Columbianum in Philadelphia, Salem’s museum fostered a linkage between science and art to advance higher learning. Silks, spices and Chinese export porcelain flooded into New England’s prime entrepôt of Asian luxury goods. Yankee seafarers, exotic foreigners and the occasional elephant trod Salem’s bustling docklands. Fidelia Bridges and Nathaniel Hawthorne grew up here. Stripped of its masts and rigging, the Friendship awaits a refit. Resounding with hushed memories, Derby’s wharf reaches into the harbor, a barren elegy to former glory.

Salem Harbor. Fitz Henry Lane. 1852

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Cathedral Rocks below Emerson Inn. Labor Day. Monday September 3, 2012. Homage to Bernard Chaet

At Joshua Tree National Park, rocky outcroppings were formed as a byproduct of plate tectonics and shaped by erosion. The fractured granite headland known as Cape Ann was generated in much the same way, with a few noticeable differences owing to climate. While the southern Mojave formations were sculpted by wind and chemical erosion, the granite shoreline at Cape Ann is also subject to extreme fluctuations in temperature. Water seeps into tiny crevices during the warmer seasons. As the mercury slips below freezing, trapped water expands, widens the fissures and eventually shatters the rock. This proceeds at a slower pace in substrates covered by sand, soil and vegetation. Just north of Pigeon Cove, just south of Hoop Pole Bay is a wide crescent of shoreline littered with boulders, a popular and potentially dangerous scuba-diving attraction. Traversing this natural rip-rap is a wall of granite. Jutting into the waters of Sandy Bay, Cathedral Rocks have resisted the wrecking-ball, but must one day succumb to tempests and breakers. All along the New England coast, tidal pools teem with life, from sea-urchins and starfish to mollusks and crustaceans; a smorgasbord for terns and gulls. Loons and diving Cormorants fish the waters just offshore. Like an earworm that just will not get out of your head, it is impossible to confront a vista such as this without Cézanne looking over your shoulder. Not that it looks anything like Provence, but Cezanne might have been enthralled by its geology. During our last visit to Bernard Chaet’s summer home a year or two before, he had aged noticeably. Departing for lunch at The Lobster Pool near the northern tip of Cape Ann, he passed me the keys to his minivan. I was stunned. Bernie had long cultivated a special relationship with motoring, manifested in a demonstrative approach to highway safety. As I sat drawing, on a low escarpment behind the Emerson Inn, Bernie was on my mind. Mindful that he was failing, not knowing that soon he would be gone, I dedicated this painting to him; a prayer for the dying, a way to say thanks and farewell.

Cathedral Rocks below the Emerson Inn. Pigeon Cove, MA. August 31, 2013.

Having visited Cape Ann once or twice as a teenager I was curious to see it anew, through the eyes of a freshly minted graduate of the Yale School of Art. Bernard Chaet had been a mentor and advocate during my two years in the program. Working as his teaching assistant in an undergraduate drawing class launched me into a career in higher education. His way of leading students to knowledge, and motivating them with curiosity continues to influence my approach to teaching, including the creation of the book you are reading. In the summer of 1976, a few months after graduation, my then partner and I traveled to Manchester-by-the-Sea to have lunch with friends of her family. Following a splendid repast surrounded, by works by the American Impressionists, we drove north on Route 128 to Cape Ann. The Chaets summered in a charming cottage on Granite Street, aka Highway 127; the two-lane highway that leads through Rockport around the tip of Cape Ann to Lanesboro. It was the first of many visits. In the decades that followed, Bernie was drawn to the rocky shoreline, the sea, and the sunrise, which became his muse. Chaet’s lifelong passion for Jazz undergirded his drawing and painting compositions; manifested in rhythmic juxtapositions and pictorial patterns. In his final works, brushes loaded with color jammed with Django, Bird, Dizzy and Miles; the earth, the sea and the air.

Bernard Chaet. Untitled. Watercolor on paper. 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy Alpha Gallery, Boston,

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260 degrees from 43.9279 x -69.7908 (top) sight vector 240 degrees (below)

Rising from the outflow of Moosehead Lake, the Kennebec River travels more than one hundred and fifty miles before passing through a bottleneck of sandy tidal flats to enter the Gulf of Maine. Located at the southern end of the narrows is a small peninsula bounded to the east by the sea, and by Atkins Bay to the west. Below the tip of Sabino Head is a flat, slightly elevated piece of ground upon which in 1607 an English colony was founded by the Virginia Company.

Map of St.George’s Fort, Phippsburg. Maine 1607. Courtesy Maine Historical Society

Like Jamestown, which was settled the same year, the site was fortified against the elements and hostile acts by the French, Spanish and indigenous Abenaki, who were less than welcoming. Finding itself rudderless following the death of its governor Sir George Popham, the colony was abandoned in 1608. Due to its strategic location at the mouth of the Kennebec River, defensive positions at Popham Point were improved during every national conflict, up to and including the Second World War. Most notable among these is a two-tiered casemated Third-System forty-two-gun coastal fortification. Using local granite, construction began in 1861. Building ceased on the unfinished structure in 1869. Looking south across the mouth of the Kennebec from Drummond Point I embraced the format of a double panorama; left side on top, right side below. The blocky profile of Fort Popham appears at top right, while the Popham Colony site begins just beyond it to the right, continuing on the left side of the lower vista.

View of the gorge (rear wall facing the land) of Fort Popham. April 12, 2016. 6:10 pm

Working on the painting @ Drummond Point.
August 2, 2019. 4pm

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Essex River. Labor Day 2013. Watercolor and colored pens on paper (Moleskine Watercolor Journal)
The composition was laid out at 10:30 and elaborated later in the day before 6:30 pm.

The territory between Cape Ann and the Merrimack River were known in the local Algonkian dialect as Wonnesquamsauke; land of pleasant waters. Anglicized as Agwam, the indigenous Asquam tribe was ravaged by European diseases following contact with British settlers in 1634. All within forty years had either succumbed, migrated north, or were assimilated. Divided by the Annisquam River, town of Gloucester extends west of Cape Ann to another estuary. Traversing a maze of tidal swamps, dozens of creeks, runs and rivulets converge with the outflow of Chebacco Lake between a cluster of wooded low-lying hills. Here a settlement district was established under the administration of the town of Ipswich, which forbade any man to raise a town hall without permission. Citing gender as a loophole, the women of Chebacco village took up men’s tools, defied the law, and won autonomy for their community. Five years later, Chebacco was recognized as an independent parish. Owing to a series of wars with France and Britain, the district suffered many hardships. Reorganized in 1819 as the township of Essex, shipbuilding flourished at the head of the Essex River, supplying schooners and other sailing vessels for nearby fisheries and coastal transportation. The twentieth century saw the industry decline, and ultimately disappear. In 1916, local shopkeepers Bessie and Chubby Woodman shucked some clams and fried them. Their invention made culinary history, by purposing lowly bivalves to glories beyond chowder, while planting a seed that would resurrect Essex as a tourist attraction. With its restaurants, antique shops, shipbuilding museum, and few overnight accommodations, the historic village seems more like a day trip from Boston’s northern suburbs than a destination for vacationers.

Essex River. 8:00 pm, Labor Day 2013. Watercolor and colored pens on paper (Moleskine Watercolor Journal)

The Essex River Motel, now Shea’s Colonial Inn and Motel, is one of few overnight accommodations in Essex, and the last ground-level motor-inn to survive in the Cape Ann Region. Sheltered by an overhanging roof, guest-rooms look out across a grassy bank toward the river. Highway 133 follows the historic overland route linking Gloucester to Ipswich, with Newburyport beyond. Seen from the common porch, Essex River flows toward us past a hairpin meander a few hundred yards to the northeast. The wooded village rises on a low hill beyond. Lying off to the right, fragrant salt-marshes flank the stream on its course to Essex Bay. Hastened by the failing light, I repeated the composition of another painting made earlier in the day. Rather than allow the image to fill the page-spread, I had in both instances delineated the framed within the page. Having jotted notes onto other paintings, I weighed the merits of establishing a narrow space around the image to receive marginalia.

Summit Springs Battlefield, Oil n canvas. 50 x 66 inches. 2000

My recent paintings of the American West were exhibited in 2001 at the Donegal County Council gallery in Letterkenny. Reproduced on the postcard announcing the show was a painting of Summit Springs, an Indian Wars battlefield on the high plains of northeastern Colorado. Ghostly words written in the sky paid homage to Cheyenne-Arapaho artist Edgar Heap of Birds, and to those members of his community who fell in the battle. When he received the card Bernie Chaet shot back a hand-written note that said in large block letters, “These are paintings, not posters!” Given that the painting is question was nearly six feet wide, perhaps he had a point. Something about the light that evening reminded me of prints by Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858), nearly all of which include calligraphic elements. Painting in books also provided a less formal approach than what Bernie had in mind.

Ando Hiroshige. (1797-1858) Yabase no Kihan. Color woodblock print on paper. 1834 (from the suite Eight Views of Omi)

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