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Jamie Wyeth first sailed to Monhegan Island in 1961 at age fifteen. Twenty miles off Cushing, halfway up the coast of Maine, there on Monhegan he found artistic inspiration for the next twenty years. “I started painting when I was very young and that’s all I did.” Jamie painted Monhegan’s gulls and sheep, its rocks and shingled houses, in all seasons and weathers, benign or menacing.
“My house paintings, on Monhegan in particular, really are portraits. I mean they’re as much portraits of the island as the people are. The houses have taken on a whole kind of life out there. People on the island refer to houses by people’s names. I think I had to get, not the trust of the islanders, but I had to understand the island more. So first the houses represented the people in a funny sense and then I started painting the islanders.”
Built in 1900 by John Cabot III’s father, Cabot House is one of the three earliest summer cottages on the island and remains in the Cabot family. “I loved his name – a sort of old New England family name, and I just liked the idea of calling the painting John Cabot III.” Cabot attended the Yale School of Art in the early 1930s.
The Cabots were avid collectors of Monhegan history. In 1946, the family donated their extensive collection of island memorabilia, photographs, and newspaper clippings to the Monhegan Memorial Library. The Library is a memorial to Jacqueline Barstow and Edward Vaughan, two young islanders who lost their lives to the sea on Monhegan in 1926.
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