A L U M N I M A G A Z I N E - Colby-Sawyer College

By 2008, she had produced “An Island Kingdom:
A Documentary Featuring the 400 Year History
of The Isles of Shoals,” with her new company,
Barking Spider Productions. The film begins with
Captain John Smith’s discovery of tiny granite
islands ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire
and Maine, which he found barren and yet beautiful
and surrounded by fertile fishing grounds. He
mapped the isles, named them for himself and
claimed them for England.
From 1640 to 1680, some 600 fishermen inhabited
the isles in their heyday as the center of New
England’s fishing industry. By the late 19th century,
the fishing business had been largely replaced by a
thriving tourist industry, with big hotels cropping up
on the islands. Writer and artist
Celia Thaxter established an artists’
salon at her family’s hotel
on Appledore Island, which
attracted many of the era’s artists,
writers and musicians.
In her production notes,
Melville writes of the “island
magic” that draws people back
time and again. The magic surrounded
her as well when she
ran into a college classmate,
Jennifer Nye ’79, on Star Island,
whom she hadn’t seen in 30
years, and again, when she connected
with Celia Hubbard, who
agreed to read passages for the
film from Among the Isles of
Shoals, a book written by the
woman she was named after, her great-great-great
grandmother, Celia Thaxter. Melville knew she was
fated to produce this film when her father showed
her their family tree, which revealed that Sophia
Peabody—wife of 19th-century writer Nathaniel
Hawthorne who had published, after his death,
his diary of a visit to the Isles of Shoals and Celia
Thaxter’s salon—was the daughter of Melville’s
great-grandmother’s sister.
In “An Island Kingdom,” which was nominated
for an Emmy, Melville brings watercolor and oil
paintings, poetry and prose, photography, film and
period music together to set the scenes across time
of the Isles of Shoals. It’s a captivating story full of
old island magic.
Mountain Majesty
While filming some of the original paintings for “An
Island Kingdom” at Banks Gallery in Portsmouth,
Melville came across stunning 19th-century paintings
of the White Mountains in northern New
Hampshire. She learned that the works were representative
of The White Mountain School of Art, a
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loosely connected but influential group of artists
and writers who brought the region’s wild beauty
and grandeur into the young nation’s consciousness.
Before she finished her first film, her second
began to take shape in her imagination.
“Most people don’t know about the White
Mountain School at all; it’s not that popular a
school or style,” Melville says. “What was so compelling
for me was that the artists were considered
the first American landscape painters—there were
about 400 of them—and many went on to form the
renowned Hudson River School later in the 19th
and early 20th centuries.”
“Brush and Pen: Artists and Writers of the
White Mountains,” which Melville wrote and edited,
directed and produced, and
raised funds for over the last two
years, was completed in January
2011 and is airing this summer
on NHPTV and in small
theaters and venues around the
state. For this one-hour documentary,
Melville tells a riveting,
albeit compressed story of
how artists and writers reflected
and shaped the discovery and
civilization of a mountainous
wilderness.
Just as human tragedy
attracts instant media attention
today, news of an avalanche
A painting of the White Mountains by William F. Paskell (1866-1951), who in the White Mountains on
painted in an impressionistic style in watercolor and oils.
Aug. 28, 1826, that killed seven
members of the Willey family
and two hired men spread across the country.
Thomas Cole, who went on to found the Hudson
River School of art, was one of the first artists to
venture into the White Mountains wilderness and
portray its beauty, power and majesty in his paintings
as sublime expressions of God.
New England writers such as Hawthorne,
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and
John Greenleaf Whittier followed, capturing their
impressions in prose and poetry. Hawthorne’s visits
inspired short stories such as “The Ambitious
Guest,” based on the Willey tragedy, and “The
Great Stone Face,” about the famed Old Man of the
Mountain. Thoreau’s walks in the mountains led
him to write about the region’s “surprising grandeur”
and declare that “life consists of wildness.”
Whittier connected the wilderness to the nation’s
evolving identity, asserting that the mountains
personified “liberty and peace” and his belief that
“contact with nature is essential to character.”
Hundreds of other curious artists and writers set
out for the White Mountains in search of subject
matter and inspiration, and over time, their collective
work transformed the nation’s view of wilder-
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