To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Peter Ralston's iconic photograph Pentecost, Island Institute released this special edition poster. Printed on high-quality paper with a silk finish and measuring 19" x 28.5".
This image was voted Maine's #1 Most Iconic Image of All Time by Down East Magazine.
The story of Pentecost begins when Betsy Wyeth bought her second island in Maine, in 1980, when Ralston was 30 years old and had committed to making the midcoast his home. Allen Island consisted of 450 wild acres in Muscongus Bay, 4 miles southwest of Port Clyde. When the English explorer George Weymouth put up there in 1605, he called his anchorage Pentecost Harbor, after the Christian holiday he spent there, celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit.
After clear-cutting the island’s north end, Ralston and the Wyeths conspired to keep the land open with a resident sheep herd, a time-honored method on Maine’s islands. Together with a friend, Philip Conkling — with whom he’d go on to found the Island Institute in 1983 — Ralston helped arrange for the purchase of several sheep from a neighboring island. To retrieve them, he enlisted help from a pair of Port Clyde fishermen, but the skipper didn’t want livestock aboard, hence the tow-behind dory.
To hear Ralston tell it, Operation Sheep Transit was a fairly carefree affair. Beers were consumed. Ralston borrowed an AquaSport to tail the dory and get a few shots. Conkling took the helm, and as a fog settled in and the light went soft, the pair damn near tipped the dory as Ralston urged him to get “closer, closer, dammit!” He took the shot that became Pentecost while standing wobbly in the bow, just as it managed to collide with the dory’s stern.
Today, Pentecost is the most recognizable of the 24 highly recognizable images that comprise what Ralston calls his Master Prints series. It graced the first cover of the Island Institute’s Island Journal in 1984. He’s sold prints to collectors on every continent but Antarctica. And while Ralston treasures both the moment and the memory, he remains at a loss to explain the photo’s long and profound appeal.
