Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, July, 2003 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

In 1904 Childe Hassam traveled to Portland, Oregon, to install a mural he had painted for the study in the house of his friend Charles Erskine Scott Wood, a prominent Portland lawyer; poet, art collector, and painter himself. Together the two men journeyed along the Oregon coast and into the remote Great Sandy Desert region of Harney County in eastern Oregon to paint. They often set up their easels side by side and painted similar landscapes, as demonstrated by the examples shown here. Everything was not always blissful, however. While working on these canvases, Hassam reputedly leaned over and painted directly on Wood's work, incensing his friend, who then refused to complete his picture. Two years later, Judge Charles H. Carey, who had bought Hassam's painting, finally convinced Wood to finish his and then had the two works framed as a pair in gilded and ornamented frames made by the famous Carrig-Rohane Shop in Boston. They descended in Carey's family until last year. In a satisfying full circle, they were then acquired by the Portland Art Museum, an institution that Wood had helped to found in 1892.

Hassam was clearly enthralled by the enormous skies, wide open spaces, and extraordinary colors he found in the high desert country of eastern Oregon, and he and Wood trekked into the region again in 1908. He later wrote, "I was at a point the furthest removed from railroad and telegraph in the United States....The nearest town--Ontario, Ore--is 187 miles distant....The air is limpid and liquid, the skies are stupendous and the distances amethystine" (quoted in Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Childe Hassam: American Impressionist [Prestel-Verlag, Munich and New York, 1994], p.136). Over the course of his two visits, Hassam painted more than three dozen oils and watercolors of the landscape, many of which were acquired by Portland families. The Portland Art Museum already possessed several other Oregon works by Hassam and is preparing an exhibition of his Oregon paintings for 2005.

RELATED ARTICLE: Left: On the Snake River, Oregon, by Childe Hassam (1859-1935), 1904. Signed and dated "Childe Hassam 1904" at lower left. Oil on canvas, 25 by 30 inches. The original frame is by the Carrig-Rohane Shop, Boston, 1905-1906. Portland Art Museum, Oregon, 110th Anniversary acquisition with support from the Collins Foundation in honor of Tom Stoel and Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Hayes Jr. with support from Brooks and Dorothy Cofield.

Right: Untitled (Snake River Plain), by Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944), 1904-1906. Signed and dated "C. E S Wood/1906" at lower left. Oil on canvas, 25 by 30 inches. The Carrig-Rohane frame is original. Portland Art Museum, museum purchase made possible by a from Brian and Gwyneth Booth.