A talk with Jefferson Navicky & Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.

Harrison Bird Brown of Portland was one of 19th-century Maine's most successful marine and landscape painters. Maine State Historian Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr. will discuss Brown's life and career. His illustrated remarks will be based on his publication, "A Century of Portland Artists, 1820-1920: Landscape Paintings from the Maine Historical Society Collection." Brown served as inspiration for poet and archivist Jefferson Navicky’s most recent book, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands. The story is a novel in prose poems about three generations of landscape painters, starting with a fictionalized Harrison Bird Brown. Navicky will read selections from the book, and will speak about how Harrison Bird Brown and landscape painting inspired his latest book.

About the presenters:

Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023) as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments on Short Prose (2021), which won the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry. He works as the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.

Earle Shettleworth, Jr. became interested in historic preservation in 1961 when, at the age of 13, Portland's Union Station was destroyed in favor of a strip mall. In 1970, he earned a B.A. in Art History from Colby College. He also earned an M.A. in Architectural History from Boston University in 1979, an L.H.D. from Bowdoin College in 2008, and an L.H.D. from the Maine College of Art in 2012. Earle served as president of the Maine Historical Society from 1977 to 1979. In 2004 Governor John E. Baldacci appointed him as State Historian, and he was reappointed to a second term by Governor Baldacci in 2008 and to a third term by Governor LePage in 2014.