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Editor’s note: On a recent visit to Southern Island in Maine, Lighthouse Digest historian Debra Baldwin sat down with famed artist Jamie Wyeth to talk about the 43 years the Wyeth family has had ownership of Tenants Harbor Lighthouse. Part one of the edited, transcribed excerpts of Jamie’s fond reminiscences follow.
Beginnings
I was the first one to fall in love with islands as a child. I always wanted to live on a boat. Three weeks on a boat gets pretty cramped and an island is the next thing to a boat – there you are, surrounded by water and yet you have a lot of the qualities of land, which is nice.
With the money I had from my first show in New York when I was 18, I bought my house on Monhegan Island. I kept telling my mother, in particular, that islands really are the way to go, and so, she bought Southern. She adopted it after I convinced her- only because I had lived on Monhegan and just absolutely adored it.
I don’t think it was the fact that there was a lighthouse here; it was really just the fact that it was an island and that my father grew up in this area and spent all his childhood and young life rowing to islands in his dory and painting with his great friend, Walter Anderson, who was a fisherman. And so, islands were a strong part of his life. But the lighthouse had been abandoned, of course, for years and it was in pretty bad repair. Some real estate person knew of my mother’s interest and my interest in islands, and so my parents bought this.
There were no restrictions at all except that you couldn’t even put a flashlight up in the tower once it was decommissioned for fear that someone would think that it was a navigational aid. There was no protection – people didn’t give a damn about lighthouses. They were tearing them down. I mean, Two Bush Light was used as a demolition target for the military and they blew up the house. They just wanted to get rid of them.
Restorations
But my mother wanted to revive it. It was in a lot of disrepair. Everything was abandoned and wind was blowing through it, so she went right to town and rebuilt a lot of it. She loved having things constructed and designed – look at this beam in the living room. But other than that, this room is exactly the same. I’m assuming the floors are original – they must be.
Really, nothing was changed at all exterior-wise. This old building is never going to cave in. Everything is original. Absolutely no changes – no walls were taken down. I think my mother wanted to keep the integrity of the place. These are the original windows which are still remarkable.
My mother was always discovering new things. She found a stone marker outside that said U.S. Lighthouse Establishment, and originally, this outer wall was all that the Lighthouse Service owned on the island. I presume the island was owned by a local person, so that was marking the boundaries of the reservation.
Renovations
And the bell tower, for instance – my mother did transform the interior of it into Lord Nelson’s cabin and equipped it with two huge man o’war naval cannons which she had sent over from England. They put gun ports for them in the side of the tower.
I remember the inauguration of it being Nelson’s cabin. I found this guy who was sort of a pyrotechnist and instead of cannon balls, he put tin cans of concrete in the bores of the cannons. So, my father and he and I went down to the tower and all the family were up on the hill here. There were all these things you had to do to pack it and load it and do the fuse.
On the ship, they tie the cannons down. They release them to pull them back to muzzle load them, and then they tie them again, so that when it recoils, it doesn’t fly across the deck. Well, we didn’t tie it down and my God, when he touched one off, the whole thing came flying back and luckily missed the three of us, but it blew out two of the windows in the tower!
Of course, we came out with our hair all frayed and faces blackened and all my family on the hill was applauding because the can fired out and splashed, but we couldn’t hear for a half an hour afterwards. That was quite exciting. Needless to say, that was the last time we fired a cannon from inside the bell tower!
That was the only change in the tower. All the inner workings were just dumped overboard. Those towers are right there next to the water and built so heavily – the timbers are anchored down with bolts into the ledge. They didn’t want that thing to go anywhere, that’s for sure. And if you look at the foundations of this house and the light itself, they are enormous blocks of granite. How they ever brought them out here – what an effort!
Inspirations
My father did paintings of lighthouses; if you were a painter and lived on the coast, you’re going to stumble upon lighthouses. The isolation fits right in. And oddly enough, that was my mother – islands were right up her line. She knew my father would probably paint the lighthouse, which he did. There are a number of paintings he did of the watch room. There’s one called Boarding Party which is this table and you see a sail going by out the window. He painted that Bellamy Eagle on the far wall with the dog sleeping under it. So, he painted the interior many, many times.
My father never wore a wristwatch and the problem with an island is that you have to get on and off and you have to depend on people to pick you up and bring you back. That, he didn’t like. He ended up calling this island his “Elba,” which of course is from Napoleon, where he eventually died. But he ended up doing some of his best work here, I think.
The Dr Syn painting in the bell tower had a lot to do with death. The skeleton was my father’s. He had had his bones x-rayed, and so he wanted to use that. In a lot of my father’s work, he was pretty consumed with death; and so, I think the skeleton represented that. But he didn’t die until in his 90s! He had a very serious operation when he was young when they removed a part of his lung. People have obsessions and that I think is what makes his work fascinating because under it is this undercurrent of danger.
Dr. Syn, the movie character, influenced my father as a child. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he led two lives. The jacket in that painting was first used by Howard Pyle. It was an original jacket from the War of 1812. Howard Pyle used it in a number of illustrations. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, then used it, and then my father, and then I used it in a painting from Monhegan called The Mainland, and it was this scarecrow figure wearing this amazing jacket.
My mother adored my father’s work. I think Dr. Syn was a highly personal painting. It’s very small and a lot of people look at it and say, “What the hell is going on? What’s this about?”
My father had very mixed emotions about this island when he moved here. He thought he was stuck on this island and then he starting creating these things, so I think Dr. Syn was probably part and parcel with those emotions, sitting staring out to sea.
Marshall Point Light is where my father grew up with his mother and father near Port Clyde. He always told this wonderful story that later in life, he happened to be back at Marshall Point, which was a working lighthouse at the time and wasn’t automated. He was working on a painting and the keeper came out and kept looking over his shoulder and finally said, “Well, that’s a pretty good job, but if you want to see a REAL good job, come on into the house.”
And so, my father packed up his watercolor stuff and went into the house and this guy had a calendar with my father’s painting on it that he had done 30 years before! My father said it so depressed him. He thought, Oh my God, he thinks this is a more interesting painting, and it was just a calendar painting he did for some company!
To Be Continued in
January/February 2022 . . .
This story appeared in the
Nov/Dec 2021 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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