Childe Hassam en plein air

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2004 by Margaret E. Bullock

Painting outdoors is a time-honored tradition. It is particularly favored by artists who wish to convey a distinct experience, and it was extensively practiced by the American impressionist Childe Hassam. Versatile and prolific. Hassam was a committed traveler who regularly painted his surroundings: New York's streets, the coast of New England, Europe, and the American West. He worked in a variety of mediums and often modified his technique to suit his subjects or circumstances. His location--in the studio or outdoors--directed the course of his adaptable brushwork.

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One of the hallmarks of impressionist painting is a sense of immediacy. Often implicit is the notion that the painter stood outdoors on the spot depicted--painting en plein air--and created a finished work, truly capturing a passing impression. The reality was often less straightforward; it is now well known that although impressionist painters regularly carried their sketch pads and paint boxes into the streets and fields, many completed the works in their studios, sometimes long after.

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Hassam was a plein air painter throughout his career. (2) One likely inspiration was a childhood memory he still recalled late in his life: "The first man that I saw using paint in the field was Frank Myrick [c. 1850-1917; a Boston painter and illustrator]. It was at the back of my house and was surrounded by trees. I was probably eight, ten, or twelve years old at that time." (3) Hassam began as an illustrator, working first for a wood engraver in Boston and then working freelance, a formative experience that required quickly capturing images on the street. When he began painting in the early 1880s, he worked in watercolor, primarily out of doors, like the English landscape artists he admired, such as John Constable (1776-1837) and Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828).

While studying at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1886, Hassam continued to paint on the streets, though by this time he was working more frequently in oil. He sometimes traveled around in cabs, propping his canvas on the facing seat when he found a suitable subject--a method he carried back to New York City. His subsequent wholehearted adoption of impressionist painting and its central admonition to paint one's own time and environment also guaranteed that he would continue to work en plein air to some extent.

Hassam traveled frequently, spending his summers in coastal settings such as the Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire, and later in Gloucester; Massachusetts; Cos Cob, Connecticut; and other resort towns. In 1896 and 1897 he made another extended trip to Europe. Several photographs and anecdotal accounts confirm his penchant for painting outdoors during these travels (see Fig. 1). One biographer noted that he "was lampooned at Old Lyme for his habit of painting bare-chested in the fields." (4) And as late as 1932, three years before his death, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City filmed him working outdoors at his easel.

The challenges and complications of plein air painting can be myriad, and it is not surprising that many artists chose to complete works, particularly oils, back in their studios. Hassam's working method was to plot out his composition on the canvas, usually on site, then fill it in, often back at the studio. He is known to have worked and reworked his canvases, sometimes over the course of several years. Thus many images are as much based on memory and interpretation as on literal description. Hassam himself observed that "the definition so often given of the work of the modern painters in landscape--which is, that they take a motif anywhere, as if looking out of an open window, and paint it just as they see it--is partly erroneous, only a half truth." (5) However, the abiding appeal of working en plein air was the direct relationship with the subject and the sense of immediacy it offered as well as the spontaneity or experimentation in techniques it often fostered.

One mid-career body of work that illustrates how plein air painting affected Hassam's working method is a group of images (both oil studies and finished canvases) that he created on a trip to Oregon in 1908. Hassam had first traveled to Oregon in August 1904 at the invitation of Charles Erskine Scott Wood, a lawyer, author, and patron of the arts in Portland, (6) whom he met through their mutual friend, the painter Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919). Wood commissioned Hassam to create a mural for the library in his Portland residence and invited him to travel out West with the canvases and spend some time there. The two journeyed throughout Oregon, where Hassam painted coastal scenes, mountain landscapes, and the lush Willamette Valley as well as a number of portraits of well-to-do Portlanders and images of the city itself. Wood ended their tour in the high desert country of Malheur and Harney Counties in eastern Oregon. He had discovered this territory as a young soldier and fallen in love with its stark beauty. It became a regular subject for his poetry and his painting, and he visited it often. (7)