As a teen in Boothbay Harbor in the late 1910s, Deane Keller delivered ice to fellow summer residents, with a horse named Colonel.

Nearly three decades later, during World War II, he would travel up Italy's boot by jeep, on orders from General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The artist and Yale University professor was one of the volunteer enlistees known as the monuments men, who found and protected Europe's stolen and threatened artwork amid the perils of war.

Youngest son William Keller, once a deckhand for Dave Dash on the Holiday, recalls his father talking about his wartime service. Deane Keller and his driver would often be entering a city where the small arms fire had just ceased, but shell-bombing was still going on.

“He told me that once he was riding in a jeep and a shell hit in front of it and one hit behind, and that was the way (those firing) would get their range. The third shell missed,” said Keller, who is the fine arts librarian for the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia.

Attached to the Fifth Army, Deane Keller would talk with a city's mayor and other locals in his efforts to locate artwork.

He had learned Italy's culture, geography and language in the late 1920s, while studying at the American Academy in Rome; he won the Rome Prize for painting.

“So he was very well-equipped for the monuments man role,” William Keller said.

Deane Keller's wartime work in Italy was a parallel effort to fellow Americans' work in Germany, as featured in the recently released movie “Monuments Men.”

He served in Italy from 1944 to 1946; in 1945, he began to orchestrate the return of artwork to Florence. That July, he organized a train of 22 rail cars full of art. Armed military police guarded the train; it arrived to a welcoming ceremony in Florence, William Keller said.

For the city, the art's return was a morale boost and a symbol of the return of peace; for Deane Keller, that day and his wartime experience as a whole had meaning, as well, his son said.

“He was very grateful, and I think felt fortunate, to have been able to protect the art that meant so much to him, as an artist.”

The same love of art that led Deane Keller and his contemporaries to enlist was also a part of his lifetime of summers in Boothbay Harbor.

He painted watercolors of the fish hatchery and other local spots, before and after his wartime service. He also painted portraits of some of the faces of St. Andrews Hospital in his day. The portraits of doctors George Gregory and Phil Gregory and head nurse Mabel Brackett remain at what is now the urgent care center, William Keller said.

The Keller family's ties to Boothbay Harbor date to 1916, when Deane Keller's father Albert G. Keller saw an ad for farmland in the Boston Evening Transcript.

Looking to get away from New Haven, Conn.'s hot and humid summers, he bought the McKown Point Road property from fish hatchery superintendent E.E. Hahn and L.A. Moore, a well-known local property owner who sold land to Boothbay Harbor's second generation of summer residents.

Contractor Manley Reed then built most of the summer house, where Albert G. Keller would wake up to the start of a fisherman's one-cylinder engine near the Oak Grove Hotel.

An early member of the Juniper Point Improvement Society, he played tennis at its community house on McKown Point Road with a fellow Yale professor, law professor Arthur L. Corbin.

Keller found such a good dentist in Dr. Edward Sprague, on Boothbay Harbor's Gregory block, that he had his son Deane Keller drive him from Connecticut to dental appointments there.

Deane Keller died in 1992. His love of art lives on in the artwork he saved in Europe; his own works he created on the peninsula; and in generations of his family, which still has the summer home and continues to use it.

His eldest son Deane G. Keller taught drawing and anatomy at Lyme Academy in Connecticut and used to get driftwood from the shores of Ovens Mouth for the sets he designed for the Boothbay Playhouse. William Keller's daughter Belle Hornblower, Deane Keller's granddaughter, designs jewelry and storefront windows. She worked at Robinson’s Wharf as a teen.

Maine attorney Lee Corbin, granddaughter of Albert G. Keller’s tennis buddy Arthur L.Corbin Sr., officiated at Hornblower's 2009 wedding at one of the Keller family’s favorite spots, Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

“We're over there all the time,” William Keller said. His wife, botanical illustrator Judith Bloomgarden, is a past volunteer at the Gardens’ library.

William Keller said his father loved the Boothbay region and enjoyed his summers there, whether going to a casino on the Isle of Springs or watching the working waterfront. He loved the visual quality of the trawlers and draggers on Boothbay Harbor's east side, his son said.

The summer house and the peninsula remain a touchstone for the family, a place where members come from wherever they live to spend time together and enjoy the beauty of the place Albert G. Keller found in that ad, 98 years ago.

Hornblower, 31, of Boston gave birth earlier this year to Isla Hornblower, great-granddaughter of monuments man Deane Keller. She represents the fifth generation that will come to the summer house, her mother said.

“It’s really important to me to spend as much time as I can there, with everybody being there and now with my daughter,” Hornblower said.

“That's where the continuity of our lives is,” William Keller said.

Editor’s Note: Photos are the property of the Deane Keller and Hornblower families and may not be used, downloaded or reproduced without permission.