City: Boothbay Harbor, ME

Category: Shopping

Telephone: (207) 633-6849

Address: 31 Townsend Ave.

Description: The Gleason Gallery isn’t quite what you’d expect a resort town gallery to be. While many such places are filled with seascapes by second- and third-rate painters, the Gleason Gallery is full of works that might seem more appropriate on the walls of museums and can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Housed in an 1807 brick town house right in the center of town, the gallery fills eight rooms with the handiwork of Maine and Northeast artists, particularly those associated with Boothbay and Monhegan. You might see lithographs by world-renowned Fairfield Porter; gouaches by Eleanor Parke Curtis, who painted in Boothbay in the 1920s; and watercolors by James Fitzgerald, among a handful of Monhegan painters. Depending upon when you visit, you could even pick up a Wyeth. Truly a cut above most of the rest of the state’s galleries, and now with a second space at 545 Congress Street in Portland.