Painting created in early 1900s returned to family
below the lighthouse on Bon Portage Island a few miles to the westward.
“These two are the only pictures I know of that she painted from life,” she said, noting Surf off Emerald Isle had to be done before 1950 as her grandmother would not have been visiting Emerald Isle at that time, and the inscription was not in her grandmother’s hand.
CONNECTIONS TO LIGHTHOUSES
It was on Bon Portage that Smith’s connection to lighthouses began, where her parents Evelyn and Morrill Richardson were lighthouse keepers. A second gift to Smith by Tremblay — who is a wool fibre artist — of the Bon Portage Lighthouse, sparked memories of growing up on the island for Smith, and fun with her sister Anne and brother Laurie.
“This window was closer to the roof than that,” she said while looking at the artwork. “One thing we used to like to do was shimmy out the window, along the roof down onto the back porch and down the screen door on to the ground. I was so little I needed help getting out of the window and onto the roof but whatever Anne and Laurie would do I had to do. They’d pick me up and get me going.”
Smith lived on Bon Portage until she was 20. Completing a secretarial course in 1951, she got her first job in 1952, married in 1953 to a lightkeeper’s son, the late Sydney (Sid) Smith, and made the move to the Cape Sable Lighthouse station where the couple lived, worked and raised their family until 1979.
Where her grandmother Hattie had moved to Bedford in 1917, Smith said she didn’t really get to know her that well but recalls she was a kind, very loving person.
Hattie was also an accomplished seamstress creating clothing for her children that were “little works of art.
She was very supportive of her children and her husband, said Smith and would often tell stories and sing ballads as she worked.
She passed away in 1961.