11/17/2023
Becca Solway
William Ferdinand Macy was a New Bedford-born artist who, like fellow artist Wendell Macy, was a descendant of early Nantucket settler and original proprietor Thomas Macy.
Macy painted at least three large canvases of Sankaty Head along with soft-hued views of other familiar settings popular with the growing number of visitors and tourists who flocked to the island in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Macy’s 1895 rendition of Sankaty Head is one of his finest works, presenting the broad expanse of grazing lands that lead up to Sankaty Head lighthouse, built in 1849/50 to provide navigational aid to the busy stream of shipping plying the Atlantic passageway off the island’s eastern shore.
With the addition of the lighthouse, Sankaty Head became one of the most frequently visited and portrayed sites on the island. Herman Melville visited the island in July 1852 (after the publication of Moby-Dick) and toured the sublime spot, describing his impressions in a letter to Hawthorne: "The air is suppressedly charged with the sound of long lines of surf. There is no land over against this cliff short of Europe & the West Indies. . . .The sea has encroached also upon that part where their dwelling-house stands near the light-house . . . in strange & beautiful contrast, we have the innocence of the land placidly eyeing the malignity of the sea."
In Macy’s view, the bluff slopes gently down to the beach, where the ribs of a wrecked vessel sit near the mild surf. Sheep graze calmly on the grasslands and heath above, while in the distance sail and steamer traffic is visible, as are a cluster of sea birds hovering in the ocean air beneath a bank of tufted clouds. Several figures are barely noticeable on the extreme edge of the bluff near the lighthouse, walking along the bluff’s edge or perhaps picnicking, as was a popular practice in the later nineteenth century. The wide panoramic view is centered by the middle gathering of buildings made up of the keeper’s house and adjoining oil shed, and the massive red-and-white striped lighthouse, which stands nobly protective in the midst of the elemental scene.
