Friday, September 9, 2022 – ART OF CHILDE HASSAM PART ONE

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

FRIDAY,  SEPTEMBER 9, 2022



THE  777th  EDITION

ART OF

CHILDE HASSAM

LANDSCAPES


PART  ONE

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

Childe Hassam

Painter and illustrator. Hassam was a leading American Impressionist whose work was much influenced by Claude Monet. His landscapes, street scenes, and interior scenes were both popularly and officially recognized.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

Frederick Childe Hassam, the scion of an old New England family (his surname is a corruption of Horsham), grew up in the upper-middle-class suburb of Dorchester, Massachusetts. His father, a Boston merchant and hardware store owner, collected Americana well before this hobby became a popular pastime. He passed this interest in history along to his son. It is telling that the future artist first dabbled with a brush while sitting in the old coach that carried the Marquis de Lafayette through New England on his triumphal tour in 1824 – 25! Hassam, like many of his fellow artists, traveled to Europe for instruction in the 1880s and eventually settled in New York. Exposed to the full measure of urban hustle and bustle, Hassam returned to the past as often as he could and during the last forty years of his life traveled from one historic summer resort to the next, painting picturesque villages and towns throughout New England. The past is therefore a living presence in Hassam’s art. While his village scenes may appear quaint, they are also active statements about the importance of traditional New England values and institutions in an era of great change.

William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, editors, with contributions by Dona Brown, Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Judith K. Maxwell, Stephen Nissenbaum, Bruce Robertson, Roger B. Stein, and William H. Truettner Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (Washington, D.C.; New Haven, Conn; and London: National Museum of American Art with Yale University Press, 1999)

Childe Hassam learned the value of hard work after his father’s hardware store burned to the ground and Hassam left school to work as a wood engraver. He made illustrations for newspapers in his hometown of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and began painting scenes of urban life in the 1880s. Ambitious and determined, Hassam settled in New York with his wife, Maude, and set to work painting the booming city. In the summer months he traveled around New England and to Appledore Island off the coast of New Hampshire. A sociable and extroverted character, Hassam surrounded himself with friends who enjoyed lively dinner parties that lasted late into the evenings. (Broun, ​“Childe Hassam’s America,” American Art, Fall 1999)

Childe Hassam, The South Ledges, Appledore, 1913, oil on canvas,

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.62 Hassam spent many summers on Appledore Island off the coast of Maine. Every year, he and a circle of musicians, writers and other artists made an informal colony based at the home of his friend, the poet Celia Thaxter. In Thaxter’s gardens and on the rocky beaches, Hassam used the flickering brushwork and brilliant colors he had adopted in France to capture the spangled light of Appledore’s brief summer. This painting evokes the leisurely, seasonal rhythms of America’s priveleged families in the last years before the Great War. A beautifully dressed woman shields her face from the sun; she looks down and away, as if absorbed in the song of a sandpiper, the island bird that inspired Celia Thaxter’s most famous children’s poem.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006 American Impressionism emerged in the late 1880s when a generation of American artists studied abroad to absorb the new palette and compositions that were modernizing painting in France. Landscapes and domestic scenes by these American Impressionists are as wonderfully fresh and sparkling as those by their more familiar French counterparts. These artists, attracted to the light and color of painting outdoors, celebrate a modern view of life as America entered the twentieth century.

Childe Hassam spent many summers on Appledore Island off the coast of Maine. Every year, he and a circle of musicians, writers, and other artists made an informal colony based at the home of his friend, the poet Celia Thaxter. In Thaxter’s gardens and on the rocky beaches, Hassam used the flickering brushwork and brilliant colors he had adopted in France to capture the spangled light of Appledore’s brief summer. Smithsonian American Art Museum: Commemorative Guide. Nashville, TN: Beckon Books, 2015.

Childe Hassam, Up the River, Late Afternoon, October, 1906, pastel on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.65

Childe Hassam, Noon above Newburgh, 1916, watercolor on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.59

Childe Hassam, Thaxter’s Garden, 1892, watercolor on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.54

This series continues tomorrow

Friday Photo of the Day

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
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Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff

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