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The most talented and accomplished of the American practitioners of Impressionism, Childe Hassam created an extensive body of work that reflected his belief that “the man who will go down to posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of every-day life around him.” An optimist who took great pride in his country and its traditions, Hassam applied the strategies of Impressionism to modern subjects, drawing inspiration from the countryside of New England and the streets and parks of New York and Boston. A versatile artist who worked in oil, watercolor, pastel, lithography and etching, he enjoyed widespread critical and commercial success throughout the course of his long and prolific career.
Born Frederick Childe Hassam in Dorchester, Massachusetts on October 17th 1859, the artist was the son of Frederick Fitch Hassam, a prosperous cutlery merchant and Americana collector and a descendent of several sea captains and Revolutionary War patriots. His family ties--of which he was very proud--were impressive: through his mother, Rosa, he was related to the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, and through his paternal grandfather he was connected with the Hunt Family, including the Boston painter William Morris Hunt and the architect, Richard Morris Hunt.
Hassam demonstrated an aptitude for drawing during his youth. Around 1877, perhaps as a result of his father’s business losses in the Boston fire of 1872, he left Dorchester High School without graduating and joined the accounting department of a Boston publisher. Recognizing that Hassam’s talents lay elsewhere, his employer dismissed him after three weeks, advising him to pursue an artistic career. From about 1878 to 1881, Hassam served an apprenticeship with the Boston wood engraver George E. Johnson, a position that no doubt helped strengthen his skills as a draftsman. It was around this time that he began working in watercolor, a medium that would play a key role in his art for the remainder of his career. By the early 1880s, Hassam was supporting himself by working as a freelance illustrator specializing in children’s stories. Intent on developing his technical skills, he studied drawing and anatomy at the Lowell Institute around 1881. During this period, Hassam painted pastoral landscapes in and around Boston, working in a naturalistic style indebted to local artists such as George Fuller and J. Foxcroft Cole, who helped disseminate the poetic style of the Barbizon School.
Hassam made his first trip to Europe in the summer of 1883, visiting France, Spain, Italy and The Netherlands. Returning to Boston, he went on to take life classes at the School of Drawing at the Boston Art Club under the tutelage of Tommaso Juglaris. Increasingly confident about his abilities, he began working more frequently in oil. His reputation on the local art scene was enhanced in 1884 when sixty-seven of his European watercolors, exhibited at the gallery of Williams & Everett, attracted considerable acclaim for their technical facility and spontaneous feel. During that same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maud Doane, a Montrealer, and settled in an apartment at 282 Columbus Avenue in the city’s bustling South End. In the wake of his move, he turned his attention to his immediate environment, depicting Boston’s streets at different times of day under varying weather conditions, especially under rainy or overcast skies, which allowed him to explore the effects of light on wet pavement. Works from this period, such as Rainy Day, Boston (1885, Toledo Museum of Art), are highly atmospheric, painted with a subdued palette of quiet browns and greys. Notable their urban subject matter and their dramatic, plunging perspectives, these paintings functioned as American analogues to the work of conservative French Impressionists such as Gustave Caillebotte and Jean Béraud, who were becoming increasingly acclaimed in national art circles.
In the autumn of 1886, Hassam left Boston for his second trip abroad. He spent most of the next three years in Paris, where he attended classes in figure drawing under Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, Lucien Doucet and Gustave Boulanger at the Académie Julian. However, his academic training had little impact on his art; instead, Hassam looked to the example of the French Impressionist painting that he saw on visits to local galleries and museums. He continued to work on his own, painting depictions of streets, parks and fashionable Parisians in which he moved away from his former tonalist approach and adopted an aesthetic revolving around the use of broken brushwork and bright colors. Hassam’s ability to evoke the effects of brilliant sunshine and his interest in portraying the festive side of contemporary life is revealed in canvases such as Le Jour de Grand Prix (1887; New Britain Museum of American Art), among the Parisian cityscapes that, in its shimmering brushstrokes and colorful palette, anticipated the equally beautiful oils he would paint back in America.
While in the French capital, Hassam exhibited his work at the Paris salons of 1887 and 1888 and at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, where he received a bronze medal. Returning to America in the fall of 1889, he settled in New York City and continued to pursue his interest in Impressionism. He went on to emerge as one of the most celebrated of the American Impressionists, applying progressive strategies of light and color to innovative views of New York City, whose streets, in Hassam’s opinion, were among the most beautiful in the world. His views of places such as Washington Arch, Union Square and Fifth Avenue--populated by carriages and fashionable Manhattanites--delighted critics and the public, prompting the influential reviewer Sadakichi Hartmann to deem him “our street painter par excellence.” In his later--and very famous--Flag series, painted between 1916 and 1919, Hassam conjoined his interest in urban subjects with his own patriotic urgings, capturing the pale light of a winter’s day and the hustle and bustle of the city in oils such as Flags on Fifty-seventh Street, The Winter of 1918 (1918; New-York Historical Society).
A peripatetic painter who was drawn to picturesque motifs and the companionship of fellow artists, Hassam made seasonal visits to well known painting haunts along the northeastern seaboard, such as the Isles of Shoals, off the shores of New Hampshire, as well as Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. Focusing his creative energies on depicting coastlines, colonial churches, harbors and the floral environment, the artist produced some of his most celebrated paintings in these scenic locales--works that underscored the pleasant aspects of daily life and alluded to his own New England heritage. In 1904, 1908 and 1914, he made trips to California and Oregon, where, far away from the domesticated countryside of the northeast, he produced vigorous paintings that reflected his subjective response to the clear blue skies and isolated landscape that surrounded him.
Hassam’s work appeared regularly at traditional exhibition venues, such as the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he won numerous awards and honors. He was also a founding member of Ten American Painters, a group of artists--including John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir and Thomas Dewing--who seceded from the Society of American Artists in order to show their work in small, non-juried shows held annually from 1898 to 1918. In 1905 he joined the stable of artists associated with the Montross Gallery in New York, where he had numerous one-man exhibitions that contributed to his stature in the art world. In keeping with his ongoing commitment to watercolor, Hassam was also affiliated with the New York Water Color Club, which he helped establish, and the American Water Color Society. He was also a member of the Pastel Society of New York. Indeed, Hassam helped promote both media by advising museums and private collectors to acquire works on paper by American artists. His own collector base was substantial, consisting of such well-known patrons of contemporary American art such as George A. Hearn and Charles Freer.
By the early 1900s, critics such as Albert Gallatin were proclaiming that Hassam was “beyond any doubt the greatest exponent of Impressionism in America.” However, a shift in the artist’s aesthetic approach occurred around 1900 when, desirous of being perceived as more than a purveyor of optical phenomena, he began to move away from his direct, observational approach, with its emphasis on harmonious colors and staccato brushwork; indeed, while retaining his previous concern for conveying light and atmosphere, Hassam began experimenting with a more decorative, almost abstract mode of painting characterized by strong patterning, simplified forms, structured designs, elongated brushwork and a highly personal chromaticism--pictorial attributes that allied him with Post-Impressionism. This progression in his style also coincided with the emergence of a new theme in his art: while he continued to paint cityscapes and rural scenery, Hassam now took a greater interest in the figure, especially in relation to the female nude, a classical subject which he interpreted in a fresh, modernistic way. He also created renderings of contemplative young women in domestic interiors, as in his New York Window series, a group of oils executed between 1907 and 1919 that include works such as The New York Window (1912; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). After 1915, Hassam developed an interest in printmaking, etching in particular. He quickly acquired a firm command of graphic techniques that he pursued with skill and acumen for the rest of his life.
In 1898 Hassam began making summer trips to East Hampton, a small village and art colony on the South Fork of Long Island that provided him with an array of subjects in the form of old houses, sunlit flower gardens, quiet beaches and meadows, as well as golfers. His liking for the area was such that in August of 1919 he purchased Willow Bend, a colonial-style house, dating from 1722, located at 48 Egypt Lane in East Hampton. He resided there from May to October until the end of his life, his presence playing a key role in the town’s evolution as a flourishing art center.
Hassam died at Willow Bend on August 27th 1935 and was subsequently buried in East Hampton’s Cedar Lawn Cemetery. In November of that year, it was announced that he had bequeathed the remaining works of art in his studio to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, where he has been elected a member in 1920; it was his wish that they be sold to establish the Hassam Fund, whereby works by American and Canadian artists would be purchased for donation to American and Canadian museums.
Examples of Hassam’s work can be found in prominent museums and art galleries across the country, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Newark Museum, New Jersey; the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the St. Louis Art Museum; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, N.Y.; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Smithsonian National Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, among many others. The artist has been the subject of numerous monographs and catalogues, most recently Childe Hassam: American Impressionist, published on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2004).
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