3 Photos
Claus Hoie watercolors like this one
"Stove Boat
" will be donated.
“Wednesday July 25th 1843. With a long voyage ahead we wonder about our fate—to be so long and so far from home and loved ones we pray for heavenly protection from the stormy seas and the monsters of the deep. So ends this day.”
Paired with this ship’s log entry, in lovely calligraphy, is a watercolor. It shows an enormously long black whale lurking below the surface, on top of which a comparatively tiny ship plies an ochre horizon.
In the 1990s, East Hampton artist Claus Hoie used an actual ship’s log to visualize the whaling life in a series of such pairings in “The Log of the Whaler Helena,” the imagined voyage of Captain John Edwards from Sag Harbor to the South Pacific.
Many of these works can now be seen in a permanent exhibit at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett. The Claus Hoie Gallery of Whaling opened there on September 24 in a new room for which walls had been moved and a diorama removed to create space. More than 20 watercolor and pen-and-ink paintings by Mr. Hoie, who died in 2007, were donated by the Helen and Claus Hoie Charitable Foundation, which planned to ship another 11 Hoie works related to Moby-Dick to the Nantucket Historical Museum this week.
“Richard Barons did a beautiful job” in selecting the works for the East Hampton Town Marine Museum, Judith Sneddon, the foundation’s chief operating officer, said on Friday, speaking of the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society, which runs the marine museum. “You really get a feel for what whaling was like.”
In the center of the Hoie Gallery is a display case of scrimshaw products—from tiny dominoes to ornate pie crust wheels—and carved blades of baleen that look like bookmarks. Whalers worked whalebone and baleen to whittle away the long hours spent at sea, Barbara Driver, a school program coordinator and docent, said at the Marine Museum on Sunday.
The museum already had an exhibit devoted to offshore whaling, including a whaleboat once used for pursuing right whales, a kettle used for trying out whale oil, a chart showing how the whale’s fat was cut into sections, and a blubber cart that was pulled by horses wearing “sandals” on their hooves to gain traction in the sand. It also has a gallery of black-and-white photos of baymen at work and, in the backyard, a trawler that young children can climb on.
Mr. Hoie, who was born in Norway and moved to the United States at age 12, “painted right up until right before he died at 97,” Ms. Sneddon said, and he won the last of a great number of major awards only six months before his death. In addition to the sea, sailors and sea creatures, his subjects included bullfights, circuses, New England, the tropics, still-lifes and the landscape of East Hampton, to which he and his wife, Helen, who was also an artist, had moved in the 1960s. The Mulford Farm, Home Sweet Home and ice skaters on Town Pond were among the village scenes he captured.
The Claus Hoie Gallery of Whaling can be seen at the marine museum from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays through October 30, when the museum will close for the winter.
