Childe Hassam: patterns of appreciation

Magazine Antiques, July, 2004 by H. Barbara Weinberg

Childe Hassam (Fig. 1) was a prolific pioneer of American impressionism. (1) Trained first in Boston as a watercolorist and illustrator, he learned oil painting at several schools and through contact with a number of artists. His New England oils and watercolors, such as The Old Fairbanks House, Dedham, Massachusetts (Pl. II), focus on verdant pastoral landscape and evocative colonial architecture, echoing the prevailing Boston taste for Barbizon naturalism. In 1883 he made his first trip abroad, not to study but to see the sights in Great Britain and on the Continent.

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In February 1884 Hassam married Kathleen Maud Doane (1862-1946), a native of Montreal, and moved into an apartment on Columbus Avenue in Boston's recently expanded South End. There he painted a series of remarkable street scenes, including Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston (Pl. III), probably under the influence of European painters of the juste milieu such as Giuseppe de Nittis (1846-1884) and Jean Beraud (1849-1935). (2) Hassam could also have seen French impressionist paintings in Boston's Foreign Exhibition and New York's Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition, both held in 1883; on his 1883 trip to Europe; and in a huge exhibition organized by the Paris art firm Galeries Durand-Ruel in the spring of 1886 that was shown first at the American Art Association and then at the National Academy of Design, both in New York City. (3)

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Hassam finally went to Europe to study in the fall of 1886, accompanied by his wife. They rented an apartment with an adjoining studio at the edge of Montmartre, and Hassam enrolled shortly thereafter in the popular Academie Julian. He worked hard as a student, although he never overcame a tendency to render figures schematically. More mature personally and professionally than most American art students in Paris, he caught the spirit of impressionism while most of his compatriots were still ignoring it. His liberated brushwork and lightened palette are evident in pictures such as Grand Prix Day (Pl. I), but in canvases such as April Showers, Champs Elysees, Paris (Pl. IV) he just as willingly slipped back into the tonal manner he had used in Boston.

Hassam settled in New York City in late 1889, correctly perceiving better opportunities for commercial success there than in Boston. In canvases such as Fifth Avenue in Winter (Pl. V) and Union Square in Spring (Pl. VI), he adopted the French impressionists' informal compositions, elevated vantage points, and rapid brushwork to portray commonplace metropolitan subjects, albeit in a palette still alternately tonal and chromatic. He voiced an impressionist's credo in 1892: "I believe 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." (4) While Hassam was more willing than William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), for example, to leave the bucolic parks and step onto New York's busy boulevards--particularly stylish Fifth Avenue--he ignored social ferment.

From 1890 until 1919 Hassam made long visits to New England, where artists and others sought reassuring vestiges of simpler times as an antidote to modern urban pressures. The cheerful elitism and escapism that identify his city views also inform rural scenes such as Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine (cover and Pl. VIII). When Hassam portrayed New York City after 1900, he romanticized skyscrapers, and, for his window series of 1909 to 1922, he retreated from the avenues to hushed apartments (see Pl. X). Only when Fifth Avenue was festooned with colorful banners between 1916 and 1919 did he again celebrate the grand thoroughfare, in his brilliant flag series (see Pl. IX).

Beginning in 1898, Hassam added to his repertory images of nude figures that embodied symbolic ideals (see Pl. XI). He may have been moved to mine history by the rapid pace of cultural change; the emergence of unfathomable modern styles; his study of old master paintings and contemporary symbolist works during a trip to Europe in 1896 and 1897; and his respect for the leaders of the contemporaneous American Renaissance movement. Hassam also had increasing contact with the group known as the Ten American Painters, which he helped to found in late 1897. The other members included Robert Reid (1862-1929) and Edward Simmons (1852-1931), who were creating allegorical murals, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing (1851-1938), a specialist in evocative paintings of women. (5) Although Hassam was stimulated by these concurrent traditionalist efforts, he was unusual in "treating the modern with the classic," as he described his goal, (6) often setting his mythical nudes in identifiable impressionistic landscapes.

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Whatever his subjects, Hassam never renounced the staccato brushwork of impressionism, but some canvases reveal experiments with painting very thinly or seeking a thick, tapestried effect; emphasizing decorative surfaces; and employing vibrant, even arbitrary color. Among his most successful late works are many of the prints to which he turned his attention beginning in 1912 and more seriously in 1915 and which engaged him for the rest of his life.