Former home of artist and Hemingway friend Waldo Peirce hits market
The 4,022-square-foot Newburyport house is listed for $1,425,000 and has five bedrooms.
“I remember when my parents bought it,” Karin Peirce said regarding her childhood home at 43 Market St. in Newburyport. “It had the worst wallpaper in the world, and my mother made me paint over it.”
Karin lived in the home until she was 20, from 1963 to 1970, with her father, famed painter Waldo Peirce, and her mother, Waldo’s fourth wife, Ellen Antoinette Larsen.
Now, the 4,022-square-foot house is for sale, listed for $1,425,000.
Karin noted that her parents made a few other changes to the house after they moved in, one of which was turning a room above the kitchen into an art studio.
William Peirce, a grandson who would often visit the home with his father, Michael (one of Waldo’s sons), has his own childhood memories of the home.
“It’s a nice house and had a big garden in front,” William said. “I remember [my grandfather] smoked a pipe [that] had a distinctive smell.” William said that he can still picture the kitchen and that there was always fresh-baked bread to eat with honey.
William called his grandfather’s art studio “mysterious,” but Karin said she frequented the space — because she was the only one of his children who painted. “I could get away with anything,” she said, adding that when her mother was out of town, she would often skip school to look for canvases with her father and to visit his other studio in Newburyport.
Waldo was not your typical father or grandfather — he was good friends with famed author Ernest Hemingway, a relationship reflected in Peirce’s paintings and Hemingway’s novels.
Waldo, who graduated from Harvard and then served in the French Army during World War I, met Hemingway shortly after the war, in Paris.
“Living and painting in Paris off and on in the 1920s, Peirce became friends with many of the notables who defined this period in the arts: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, Bernice Abbott, Archibald MacLeish, LL.B. ’19, John Dos Passos ’16 — and Ernest Hemingway, [like Peirce,] another wartime ambulance driver,” Harvard Magazine wrote in 2002.
Waldo later took fishing trips with Hemingway in Key West and also traveled with him to Spain. He painted Hemingway for the cover of Time in 1937.
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At the time of his death in 1970, Waldo, who grew up in Maine, owned the home at 43 Market St., also known as the William Woart-Abigail Knapp House. The house was built in 1753, but it does not look exactly how Karin and William Peirce remember it.
From 2010 to 2014, the home underwent extensive renovations, including a kitchen remodel. The owners, who bought the home in 2007, restored the house, replacing most of the windows with high-end replicas of the originals, building a wrap-around covered porch, and updating the electrical to support modern living. They also removed the carpet on the upper level and refinished the original flooring. Outside, they installed lighting and had the property professionally landscaped.
The home’s realtor, Lynne Hendricks of Stone Ridge Properties in Newburyport, noted that maybe the most noteworthy historical detail might actually be in the basement, where there are signs that the house was linked to underground tunnels that ran from the waterfront to homes around town. These tunnels may have been used to secret in goods past the British, when they controlled the port. Wiehe said the Newburyport Historical Commission recently noticed brick on the floor in the basement that may lead to a tunnel.
What is known is that the home has five bedrooms, 3.5 baths, seven working fireplaces, a family/media room, a Dutch door to the patio that’s original to the house, the original front and back staircases, an updated butler’s pantry, and a kitchen with a breakfast nook, granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances. In the renovated master suite, there is a fireplace, a soaking tub, a dressing room, and a custom closet. Outside, there is a heated swimming pool on the 0.29-acre lot.
Wiehe will host an open house on Sunday, Nov. 4, from noon to 2 p.m.
See more photos of the home:
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Correction: In previous versions of this story, the name of the realtor was incorrect. The listing agent is Lynne Hendricks.
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