The First Spring Fog

By 1914, Alexander Bower was living and working on the Northern Atlantic Coast, mainly on the islands in Casco Bay in the Gulf of Maine. In 1921 the American Impressionist purchased a piece of coastal property near Delano Park, Maine, where he would build a home and studio on the coast of Cape Elizabeth—a primary subject in his oeuvre. As Bower retreated to the coast and removed himself from the city centers where he was raised and educated—New York and Philadelphia, respectively—his painting came to embody the surface elements of American Impressionism, which captured the beauty of familiar subjects with a delicate mixture of light and color. Here, hurried waves crash against a rocky coastline, flanked by a stagnant, dense fog and hills peppered with mounds of melting snow. Bower’s application of paint, fluctuating thick and broad brushstrokes with narrow and smoothed, seamlessly juxtapose and mediate earth, sea and sky.