Ars Longa Vita Brevis

This painting is of the wreck of the bark Annie C. Maguire at Portland Head Light, Cape Elizabeth, Maine on Christmas Eve, 1886.

Portland Head Light is one of Maine’s best-known landmarks, and several years ago I did a small-format watercolor/pen and ink painting of it. I wanted to do another one, but not a conventional view. I chose the wreck of the Maguire as my subject in part because it is one of the most famous episodes in the lighthouse’s history. But the other reason for the choice was because the wreck also dramatizes the other protagonists in Portland Head Light’s long story — the ships and men who set out to sea, the rocky coast of Maine, and the ever-present, powerful and unpredictable force of Nature. This view is how I imagined the wreck in the days after it ran aground, based on historical photos, the reports of heavy seas, and the fact that the Maguire actually broke apart in a storm the week after the wreck. This also happens to be the largest watercolor I have attempted to date, at 20 by 28 inches. The painting is framed and matted..

The Annie C. Maguire began its life in New York in 1853 as an extreme clipper named Golden State. However, after three decades in the China trade, it was re-rigged as a three-masted bark (which could be sailed with a smaller crew, and was thus more economical), and renamed the Annie C. Maguire. On Christmas Eve in 1886 the old trader was en route from Buenos Aires to its home port in Quebec, when it headed into Casco Bay in heavy snow and heavy seas, evidently intending to lay over in Portland Harbor until the offshore winter storm had passed. It struck the ledge in Cape Elizabeth at 11 p.m. “The wind was howling a gale,” the son of the lighthouse keeper later said, “I guess even Santa Claus was afraid to be out”. The event, one of Maine’s best-known shipwrecks, has long been marked by a distinctive painted inscription on the rock ledge where the Maguire foundered.*

*This account is drawn from a 12/21/2010 posting in the blog “New England Lighthouses” (nelights.blogspot.com) by Jeremy D’Entremont. For more information, see the blog, which is itself a shortened version of the account in D’Entremont’s book, Great Shipwrecks of the Maine Coast, Commonwealth editions, 2010