Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine

Red and white blossoms crowd the foreground of this coastal garden, with rocky cliffs dropping toward blue water beneath a pale sky. The composition shows cultivated flowers set against the wild edge of the shoreline, where soft color gives way to stone and sea. Painted in 1890, the piece is an oil on canvas held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Childe Hassam (1859–1935), an American painter associated with Impressionism, also created Laurel in the Ledges. One detail worth noticing is how the loose brushwork in the flowers contrasts with the firmer, more solid handling of the distant rocks and water, letting the eye move from delicate bloom to rugged edge and out toward the hazy horizon beyond.