THE ARTIST’S MOUNT DESERT, by John Wilmerding, Princeton University Press, 195 pages, $49.50.

Trying to capture the beauty of Mount Desert Island on canvas is like attempting to bottle the power of the ocean itself.

To use a wellworn description, Mount Desert is breathtaking, and its splendor has remained nearly untouched since Samuel de Champlain first put his boat ashore here.

Despite the immensity of the subject, generations of artists have followed in Champlain’s footsteps with an armful of canvases and colors.

In “The Artist’s Mount Desert,” Princeton University Professor John Wilmerding has collected nearly 150 years worth of reflections of some of the world’s most stunning scenery. It is, he says, The Timeless Place.

From the craggy, rust-colored cliffs of Great Head to the isolation of Desert Rock Lighthouse to the pounding ovation at Thunder Hole, the island’s majesty has been well-recorded by artists.

The story begins in the 1830s, a benchmark era for American culture that witnessed monumental works by John James Audubon, Alexis de Tocqueville, and a slew of painters seeking to capture the romantic’s affair with natural beauty.

One by one they came to Maine, climbing the steep rocks and bluffs of Mount Desert.

Thomas Doughty, one of the first to take on the island from various views, returned repeatedly to Desert Rock Lighthouse, then a filet mignon-shaped bar constantly barraged by surf. But, these canvases aren’t necessarily an accurate view of 19th century scenes; as Wilmerding points out, at least one of Doughty’s works underwent editorial changes when it was published in a book on American scenery.

By the mid-1840s, when Doughty’s Mount Desert career had trailed off, his work was in a sense picked up by Thomas Cole, one of the day’s most important painters. Like so many artists, Cole traipsed around the island with his sketch pad, capturing scenes in Castine, Trenton, Frenchman’s Bay, and Somes Sound.

As with those who successfully recreated the island’s splendor, Cole’s canvases are rich with color, conveying the unpredictable power of the sea.

Again, though, Cole believed it almost a duty to use his artistic license liberally, and his paintings are meant to relate the moralistic, and sometimes patriotic, themes popular in his day. In View Across Frenchman’s Bay from Mt. Desert Island, After a Squall, for example, Cole shows a bald eagle on a rock, feasting on a catch. A firsthand sighting? Maybe, but it just as well could have been a statement.

“The pictures of all great painters are something more than imitations of nature as they found it,” Cole once revealed to a friend. “If imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced in either painting or poetry.”

While there is plenty of analysis and history that helps buttress the paintings, this book could easily stand on its own as a visual, landlocked, encounter with the coast of Maine. With current photographs to display the scenes depicted in the paintings, it is a collection of the island then and now, as seen through the eyes of some of the country’s most esteemed painters.

John Ripley covers government and politics for the NEWS.