Fans of landscape and seascape painting are in for an extra treat if they’re headed this summer to Maine. The wonderfully windowed Greenhut Gallery in Portland has just put up a solo show of the latest masterpieces from Joel Babb. It’s a particularly choice exhibition called “To the Green Woods and Crystal Waters.”

We stopped by a week after we’d gone up with Mr. Babb onto the flanks of Mount Washington to try to capture on canvas the emanations, shadows, and penumbras of Mounts Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. One passing tourist pulled out a checkbook and offered to purchase Mr. Babb’s work-in-progress on the spot.

Mr. Babb declined, underlining one of the features of his art — he holds out for perfection. Which, it turns out, requires, among other qualities, physical strength. On Mount Washington we watched Mr. Babb stand en plein air, under a cloudless sky and brutal sun, and paint without pause for four and a half hours. He did wear a hat.

No doubt the painting Mr. Babb declined to sell on the mountain will be finished in his studio. It is a large structure with north light that he built in the woods of Sumner, Maine. Mr. Babb and his wife, Frannie, settled there after careers at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where Mr. Babb was everything from night watchman to teacher of painting.

In his studio, one is apt to find Mr. Babb in paint-smudged working clothes, his dog Bruegel barking various comments. Unframed paintings, some finished, some not, are stacked around — some painted during his year in Europe, where, after studying art history at Princeton, he drew and painted extensively in Italy and Germany.

At Sumner, Mr. Babb works at a vertical easel that can hold large paintings and raise or lower them at the touch of a toggle. Mr. Babb rarely paints without a mahl stick. He favors a limited palette, starting with an underdrawing in duotone and working up, mixing his colors and adjusting his values on the basis of his own astounding eye.

The result is astonishing. At the opening reception at the Greenhut, we found Mr. Babb mobbed by admirers — and customers. The paintings themselves were now beautifully framed, none garishly and often with narrow gold frames done by a Boston genius at gilding. At the Greenhut, there are close to 20 of Mr. Babb’s canvases.

Two are river scenes captured from the air. To get the reference drawings and photographs, Mr. Babb hired a plane to bank through the Androscoggin River valley. The result isn’t photo-realism. It’s more painterly, with daring use of color and value. We’d seen the paintings, but were taken aback by their elegance once framed and properly lit.

Those are relatively small for Babbs. A good selection of major works is in the Greenhut as well. They include a 45 inch by 64 inch canvas of the northern Maine gorge known as Gulf Hagas; it will make you reach for your mosquito repellant until you realize it’s only a painting and there are no bugs in the Greenhut.

Our favorite of the canvases at the gallery is a 60 inch by 45 inch vertical view of the coast of Hardwood Island off Blue Hill, Maine. Nothing special. Just some weather-beaten trees on gray pink rocks. Millions of painters have tried scenes so simple. In all of history, only a few have nailed them so beautifully — and accurately — as Mr. Babb.

The first painting to sell from the show is “Conversation Piece,” an exquisitely painted, framed, and shown scene of four friends conversing on a porch that overlooks the ocean at the Maine coast. It’s a gem of drawing, color and value — and perspective — from an American master who, after decades of abstraction, is bringing back landscapes to rank with Constable, Kensett, Cole, and Bierstadt.

________

“Joel Babb: To the Green Woods and Crystal Waters” is up at Greenhut, 146 Middle Street, Portland, Maine, until August 3.

Images: Top, “On Hardwood Island, Blue Hill,” oil on linen 60 inches by 45 inches, Joel Babb. “Androscoggin Aerial Serpentine,” oil on linen 22 inches by 28 inches, Joel Babb. Courtesy Greenhut Gallery and the Artist.

Photograph: Joel Babb Before Mount Adams, Archive of the Sun.