About Artist and Writer George Savary Wasson |
LITERARY LIONS
Brought up in an intellectual atmosphere, artist George Wasson never lost touch with the rustic
Although George Savary Wasson was born in
In 1872 David Wasson took his son to
Wasson’s cruising brought him not only subjects for pictures, but a devoted wife. Having had one look at Amelia Inslee Bullock Webb, who was teaching school at Deer Isle, Maine, he scraped an introduction via the local postmistress, and, in a remarkably short time persuaded her to marry him. The wedding took place in 1885.
Not long after, when cruising to Castine, George Wasson put in at Kittery Point; thought it the most paintable spot he had ever seen, and determined to settle there. This he did in 1889, building a house with a studio in the top story, where half-models of ships and nameboards from vessels wrecked along the coast made sympathetic companions for his own paintings. Every bit of it he loved. The general store became his club, and its frequenters his friends. Just as he recorded in his sketch books the details of scows, pinkies, hay schooners, and wrecks, so he salted down the speech of his neighbors in note books, and from this treasury of language evolved his stories.
Much as George Wasson loved Kittery Point, he spent many weeks of each summer exploring other parts of the coast. Mrs. Wasson hated boats, however, and so remained at home during the long summer cruises to the eastward. As their two sons, David Arnold (1887-1915) and Lewis Talcott (1889-1912), acquired sea legs they would accompany their father on his wanderings.
The highly congenial life at Kittery Point might have gone on indefinitely had it not been for the premature deaths of the two sons. Lewis, an ensign in the United States Navy, died in 1912, and his older brother, David Arnold--who had inherited much of his father’s literary skill--died in 1915. Kittery Point then became too full of associations for the father and mother and for David’s widow, who made her home with them, and so in 1916 the surviving Wassons moved to
In the Wave Crest, his last boat, George Wasson would live through the summer at Castine, while his wife remained ashore in a boarding house or hotel.
Through the summer of 1931 George Wasson was hard at work on his last book, Sailing Days on the Penobscot. When the proofs arrived he was too ill to look at them, and he did not live to see the finished book. As he lay dying in
(c) Greg Gathers, 2012
Provided by Pontine Theatre