Books: Old, New and Obscure

PICTURED IN TIME: AN ARTIST’S JOURNEY AROUND THE CHESAPEAKE

By Neil Harpe
Fox Road Productions, Inc., 2024

Visual artist and musician, Neil Harpe, who was born and grew up in Annapolis, has always been captivated by the Chesapeake Bay. His recent book, “Pictured in Time; An Artist’s Journey Around the Chesapeake,” published in late 2024, captures some of the Bay’s most memorable marine stories through his photographs and paintings of 1980s and 90s Bay life.

Many of Harpe’s artworks have been showcased in America’s embassies around the world. Permanent collections of his marine art are housed at the Beverley R. Robinson Collection of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum, and also at St. Johns College.

Early in his career, Harpe set out to photograph the skipjacks that harvested oysters in the Chesapeake, along with the other aging fishing boats, lighthouses and fishing ports that had once thrived in the Bay. At one time, Annapolis was a port city with at least 2,000 skipjacks plying the Bay on their oyster mission. Many of those wooden boats had a 20-year life span. Ultimately, deemed too expensive to maintain, most ended up cast aside in the marshes of the Eastern Shore. In their heyday, however, they had a magical aura under sail harvesting for the oyster.

Harpe’s artistic renderings of these iconic boats at work 40 years ago have been brought to life in his latest publication.

Over 120 original photos, paintings and drawings, showcase the last days of the skipjack under sail at work in a now bygone era.

Learn more about the book from the artist himself via a YouTube video of Harpe at a Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum speaker event in November 2024 here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odWr9veKYP0;  and learn more about and support one of the Bay’s finest artists via his website, https://neilharpe.com/.

– Ellen Moyer