Charlotte in New York Read Online Free

sea, to tiny White Island, where her father would be the lighthouse keeper. Eventually he built a popular resort hotel on nearby Appledore Island, where painters such as Hassam and Brown were regular guests. On summer evenings, they, along with other artists, writers and musicians, would gather at Thaxter’s cottage where she, in a beautiful white dress, presided over a salon.
    J AMES A BBOTT M C N EILL W HISTLER (1834–1903) Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler moved with his family when he was nine to St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father was a civil engineer for the construction of a railroad line to Moscow. He studied drawing at the Imperial Academy of Science. After several years at West Point Military Academy where he excelled only in drawing, Whistler decided to become an artist and moved to Europe permanently when he was twenty-one. A friend of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, he soon made a name for himself as a talented painter, witty art critic and flamboyant dandy in the style of another friend, Oscar Wilde.

A UTHOR’S N OTE

    Charlotte Glidden is not a real girl, although a girl just like Charlotte could very well have traveled with her mother and artist father to France in the 1890s, when American painters flocked there to learn about the new French way of painting called Impressionism. Her journal is based on historical fact. Artists like Mary Cassatt, Theodore Butler and John Singer Sargent traveled to Paris and the beautiful French countryside to paint where French masters painted—in Monet’s village of Giverny in Normandy, for instance, and Gauguin’s hamlets of Le Pouldu and Pont-Aven on the rocky coast of Brittany. Then, with what they had learned in France, many returned to America in the late 1890s to paint in New York, a great bustling city with more than a million people, soaring skyscrapers and the longest bridges and busiest harbor in the world. American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase and Maurice Prendergast rented apartments and painting studios, often near Washington Square, painted
en plein air
in Central Park, attended exhibitions at the New York gallery of Monsieur Durand-Ruel and were invited to costume balls in grand mansions owned by art patrons such as the Havemeyers. When summer came, they, like the fictitious Glidden family of this book, escaped the city’s heat by traveling to picturesque artists’ colonies along the seacoast, such as Easthampton, Long Island and Appledore Island, off the coast of New Hampshire.

    The author wishes to thank the Pont-Aven Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Museum and the Museum of the City of New York for their assistance and access to their research libraries, as well as to acknowledge Celia Thaxter’s book,
An Island Garden
, as a source of inspiration for this book.

Text © 2006 by Joan MacPhail Knight.
    Illustrations © 2006 by Melissa Sweet.
    All rights reserved.
    Book design by Jessica Dacher.
    Typeset in Melissa Sweet Two and Adobe Garamond.
    The illustrations in this book were rendered in
mixed-media collage and watercolor.
    Good & Plenty is a registered trademark of The Hershey Company.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
    ISBN: 978-1-4521-2570-1
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