At Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick, Maine, A Seacoast Garden showcases artists who live and work along the Maine–New Hampshire coast. Presented in partnership with the Dover Arts Commission, the exhibition draws inspiration from nearby Hamilton House’s newly installed floral displays, which are based on similar arrangements created and photographed by the house’s last owner. The featured artists have captured the same landscapes that inspired creative minds more than a century ago, interpreting the region in ways that connect past traditions with present-day artistic expression.
The gardens and landscapes at Hamilton House have attracted creative minds for more than 100 years. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writer Sarah Orne Jewett frequently visited, drawn to the riverfront setting and the house’s history. Her novel, The Tory Lover, opens at Hamilton House, which had by then slipped into disrepair. Jewett called it “the ruins,” yet she also saw beauty hidden beneath overgrown fields and loose clapboards. When her Boston friends Emily Tyson and Elise Tyson Vaughan were hunting for a summer estate, she suggested they visit Hamilton House. The Tysons recognized the same potential Jewett did, and in 1898 they bought and began to restore the house and its gardens. Accomplished amateur photographer Elise documented their early years at Hamilton House and carefully arranged her photographs in albums that are now part of Historic New England’s collection.
Recent visitors to Hamilton House will have seen the installation that inspired A Seacoast Garden and shows how Elise brought elements of the landscape indoors. In the early twentieth century, she extensively photographed her coastal Maine garden, capturing its mix of native plants and carefully chosen blooms. Emily and Elise gathered flowers and foliage from the gardens and fields to create striking arrangements with which to decorate the house. Elise’s albums reveal how the garden changed through the seasons and hint at the lively atmosphere it created for parties and events.
Elise’s albums and the Hamilton House floral installation provided a framework for the exhibition, and more than a century later, artists along the Maine–New Hampshire coast are looking at their own landscapes through a similar lens. Many of the works in A Seacoast Garden come from Dover Arts Commission members who live among salt marshes, cottage gardens, and rocky beaches not so different from the Tysons’. Their paintings and photographs capture hillsides covered in goldenrod, coastal paths lined with flowers, clusters of seedpods, or a single stem in a jar. What connects these works—historical and contemporary—is a shared attention to place, rather than a common medium or style.
Take, for example, Sarah Cassani’s Pastene. Cassani has casually placed wildflowers in an empty pasta sauce jar, transforming a mundane object into art. The black-eyed Susans echo an appearance in Elise’s photograph, which captures artfully-arranged flowers on a carefully set table. Both compositions highlight how simple floral arrangements can bring life, color, and artistry to domestic spaces.
Seth Hamor’s Woman on a Journey 2 offers another parallel to Elise’s photographs. His solitary figure moves through a meadow thick with blossoms, her gaze fixed on a distant horizon. Among Elise’s surviving prints is a similar scene of a woman at Hamilton House, bending to gather flowers. Hamor’s vibrant, expressive brushstrokes and the photograph’s gentle sense of motion both capture their subjects’ connection to the Seacoast landscape.
The gently rolling hills, wildflower-filled meadows, and rocky shores of coastal Maine and New Hampshire have long inspired artists. Jewett’s literary landscapes, Elise’s photographs, and the canvases in A Seacoast Garden all draw on this terrain. Looking at the works on display in the Eastman Gallery, it’s easy to imagine Elise stepping into the frame or Jewett looking up from her notebook. The Hamilton House gardens have once again connected Emily, Elise, and their friend Sarah, reminding us how their sustained engagement with a single place shaped how they saw the world around them. By featuring local artists who continue to engage with these landscapes, the exhibition is part of an ongoing dialogue between place, art, and history.
Written by Alyssa Sweet, Site Manager, Southern Maine
A Seacoast Garden is on view at the Visitor Center at Sarah Orne Jewett House through October 12. The exhibition is open Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Hamilton House is open for tours through October 12, 2025.
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