Childe Hassam
Childe Hassam | |
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East Hampton, New York, U.S. | |
Education | Académie Julian |
Known for | Painting |
Movement | American Impressionism |
Awards |
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Frederick Childe Hassam (
Early years
Hassam was known to all as "Childe" (pronounced like child), a name taken from an uncle.
Hassam demonstrated an interest in art early. He had his first lessons in drawing and watercolor while attending The Mather School, but his parents took little notice of his nascent talent.[4]
As a child, Hassam excelled at boxing and swimming at
Career
Early career
1880s
In 1882, Hassam became a free-lance illustrator (known as a "black-and-white man" in the trade), and established his first studio. He specialized in illustrating children's stories for magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Scribner's Monthly, and The Century.[7] He continued to develop his technique while attending drawing classes at the Lowell Institute and at the Boston Art Club, where he took life painting classes.[8]
By 1883, Hassam had exhibited watercolors in his first solo exhibition at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston.[7] The following year, his friend Celia Thaxter convinced him to drop his first name and thereafter he was known as "Childe Hassam". He also began to add a crescent symbol in front of his signature, the meaning of which remains speculative,[9] possibly an allusion to his penchant for implying Middle Eastern or Turkish origins.[1]
Having had relatively little formal art training, Hassam was advised by his friend and fellow Boston Art Club member
In February 1884, after a courtship of several years, Hassam married Kathleen Maude (or Maud) Doane (born 1861), a family friend.
Hassam had moved to France to study figure drawing and painting at the prestigious Académie Julian.[16] He took advantage of the formal drawing classes with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre, but quickly moved on to self-study, finding that "[t]he Julian academy is the personification of routine...[academic training] crushes all originality out of growing men. It tends to put them in a rut and it keeps them in it", preferring instead, "my own method in the same degree".[17] His first Parisian works were street scenes, employing a mostly brown palette. He sent these works back to Boston and their sale, combined with that of older watercolors, provided him with sufficient income to sustain his stay abroad.[18] In the autumn of 1887, Hassam painted two versions of Grand Prix Day, employing a breakthrough change of palette. In this dramatic change of technique, he was laying softer, more diffuse colors to canvas, similar to the French Impressionists, creating scenes full of light, done with freer brush strokes. He was likely inspired by French Impressionist paintings which he viewed in museums and exhibitions, though he did not meet any of the artists. Hassam eventually became one of the group of American Impressionists known as "The Ten".[19]
The completed pictures he sent home also attracted attention. One reviewer commented: "It is refreshing to note that Mr. Hassam, in the midst of so many good, bad, and indifferent art currents, seems to be paddling his own canoe with a good deal of independence and method. When his Boston pictures of three years ago...are compared with the more recent work...it may be seen how he has progressed."[20] Hassam contributed four paintings to the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris, winning a bronze medal. At that time, he remarked on the emergence of progressive American artists who studied abroad but who did not succumb to French traditions:
The American Section...has convinced me for ever of the capability of Americans to claim a school.
Whistler, Sargent and plenty of Americans just as well able to cope in their own chosen line with anything done over here...An artist should paint his own time and treat nature as he feels it, not repeat the same stupidities of his predecessors...The men who have made success today are the men who have got out of the rut.[21]
As for the French Impressionists, he wrote "Even Claude Monet, Sisley, Pissarro and the school of extreme Impressionists do some things that are charming and that will live."[20] Hassam was later called an "extreme Impressionist". His closest contact with a French Impressionist artist occurred when Hassam took over Renoir's former studio and found some of the painter's oil sketches left behind. "I did not know anything about Renoir or care anything about Renoir. I looked at these experiments in pure color and saw it was what I was trying to do myself."[22]
1890s
The couple returned to the United States in 1889, taking residence in New York City. He resumed his studio illustration and in good weather produced landscapes out-of-doors. He found a studio apartment at
The sudden shift expanded his options and his range.[25] Through the 1890s, his technique increasingly evolved toward Impressionism in both oil and watercolor, even as the movement itself was giving way to Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. During his European stay, he continued to favor street and horse scenes, avoiding some of the other favorite depictions of the Impressionists, such as opera, cabaret, theater, and boating.[25] He also painted garden and "flower girl" scenes, some featuring his wife, including Geraniums (1888) which he presented at the Salon exhibition in 1889.[20] He managed to exhibit at all three Salon shows during his Paris stay but won only one bronze medal.[22]
Hassam became close friends with fellow American Impressionist artists J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman, whom he met through the American Water Color Society, and over the following months he made many connections in the art community through other art societies and social clubs.[26] He contributed works from his European stay to several exhibitions and shows. Hassam enthusiastically painted the genteel urban atmosphere of New York that he encountered within walking distance of his apartment, and avoided the squalor of the lower-class neighborhoods. He proclaimed that "New York is the most beautiful city in the world. There is no boulevard in all Paris that compares to our own Fifth Avenue...the average American still fails to appreciate the beauty of his own country."[27] He captured well-dressed men in bowler hats and top hats, fashionable women and children out and about, and horse-drawn cabs slowly making their way along crowded thoroughfares lined by commercial buildings (which were generally less than six stories high at that time). Hassam's primary focus would forever continue to be "humanity in motion".[28] He never doubted his own artistic development and his subjects, remaining confident in his instinctual choices throughout his life.[11]
It was through Theodore Robinson, who was working alternatively in America and France, that he, Twachtman, and Weir kept in close touch with Claude Monet, who was residing in Giverny at the time. The four Americans represented the core of American Impressionism, dedicated to painting what was real for them, what was familiar and close at hand, out-of-doors when possible, and with the immediacy of light and shadow—which though exaggerated and falsely colored at times—makes a purposeful impact or impression.[29] The urban scene provided its own unique atmosphere and light, which Hassam found "capable of the most astounding effects" and as picturesque as any seaside scene.[30] The challenge for the urban Impressionist, however, was that activity moved very quickly, and therefore, getting down a complete impression in oil was next to impossible. To compensate, Hassam would find a suitable location, make sketches of the components of his planned painting, then return to the studio to construct a total impression that was actually a composite of smaller scenes.[31]
During the summers, he would work in a more typical Impressionist location, such as Appledore Island, the largest of the Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire, then famous for its artist colony. Social life on the island revolved around the salon of poet Celia Thaxter who hosted artists and literary figures. The group was a "jolly, refined, interesting and artistic set of people...like one large family." There Hassam recalled, "I spent some of my pleasantest summers...(and) where I met the best people in the country."[32] Hassam's subjects for his paintings included Thaxter's flower garden, the rocky landscape, and some interior scenes rendered with his most impressionistic brush strokes to date. In Impressionist fashion, he applied his colors "perfectly clear out of the tube" to unprimed canvas without pre-mixing.[33] Artists displayed their work in Thaxter's salon and were exposed to wealthy buyers staying on the island. Thaxter died in 1894, and in tribute Hassam painted her parlor in The Room of Flowers.[33]
Starting in the mid-1890s, Hassam also made summer painting excursions to
Mid-career
The Hassams sailed first to Naples, then to Rome and Florence. Though staying firmly in the Impressionists' corner, Hassam spent much time in galleries and churches studying the Old Masters. The Hassams arrived in Paris in the spring, and then traveled on to England. He continued producing paintings with a very light palette.[37]
Back in New York in 1897, Hassam took part in the secession of Impressionists from the
In 1900, Hassam visited Provincetown, Massachusetts. Provincetown, once a thriving maritime community had begun to rely heavily on local tourism. In Building the Schooner, Provincetown, he uniquely captures a rare event in the community: the building of a schooner. The ship featured in Hassam's work was paid for by a Chicago millionaire and was the first large ship to be built in Provincetown in a quarter of a century.[41]
Hassam was astute in marketing his work, and was represented by dealers and museums in several cities and abroad. Despite the critics and conservative buyers, he managed to keep selling and painting without having to resort to teaching for financial survival. A colleague described Hassam as an artist "with a keen knowledge of distribution, the tactical ability to place his work."[40] As the new century began, some three decades after the Impressionists' first exhibitions in France, Impressionism finally gained a legitimacy in the American art community, and Hassam began to sell to major museums and receive jury awards and medals, vindicating his belief in his vision.[42] In 1906, he was elected Academician of the National Academy of Design.
After a brief period of depression and drinking as part of an apparent mid-life crisis, the forty-five-year-old Hassam then committed himself to a healthier life style, including swimming. During this time he felt a spiritual and artistic rejuvenation and he painted some Neo-Classical subjects, including nudes in outdoor settings. His urban subjects began to diminish and he confessed that he was tiring of city life, as bustling subways, elevated trains, and motor buses supplanted the graciousness of the horse-drawn scenes which he so enjoyed capturing in earlier times. The architecture of the city changed as well. Stately mansions gave way to skyscrapers, which he admitted had their own artistic appeal: "One must grant of course that if taken individually a skyscraper is not much of a marvel of art as a wildly formed architectural freak. It is when taken in groups with their zig zag outlines towering against the sky and melting tenderly into the distance that the skyscrapers are truly beautiful." Hassam's urban paintings took on a higher perspective and humans shrank in size accordingly, as illustrated in Lower Manhattan (1907).
Late career
With the art market now eagerly accepting his work, by 1909 Hassam was enjoying great success, earning as much as $6,000 per painting. His close friend and fellow artist J. Alden Weir commented to another artist, "Our mutual friend Hassam has been in the greatest of luck and merited success. He sold his apartment studio and has sold more pictures this winter, I think, than ever before and is really on the crest of the wave. So he goes around with a crisp, cheerful air."[47]
The Hassams returned to Europe in 1910 to find Paris much changed: "The town is all torn up like New York. Much building going on. They out American the Americans!"[48] In the midst of the vibrant city, Hassam painted July Fourteenth[49], Rue Daunou during the Bastille Day celebrations, a forerunner of his famous Flag series (see below).[48]
When he returned to New York, Hassam began a series of "window" paintings that he continued until the 1920s, usually featuring a contemplative female model in a flowered kimono before a light-filled curtained or open window, as in The Goldfish Window (1916).[48] The scenes were popular with museums and quickly snapped up. Hassam was especially prolific and energetic in the period from 1910 to 1920, causing one critic to comment, "Think of the appalling number of Hassam pictures there will be in the world by the time the man is seventy years old!"[50] Hassam truly did produce thousands of works in nearly every medium during his life. Where his friend Weir might paint six canvases in a season, Hassam would do forty.[11]
During that period he also returned to watercolors and oils of coastal scenes, as exemplified by The South Ledges, Appledore (1913), which employs an unusually balanced division of sea and rocks diagonally across a nearly square canvas, giving equal weight to sea and land, water and rock.[50] This painting shows the famous writer Celia Thaxter's home in Appledore Island. The South Ledges, Appledore[51] is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. He also produced some
Hassam displayed six paintings at the landmark Armory Show of 1913, where Impressionism was finally viewed as mainstream and nearly an historical style, and displaced by the clamor over the radical revolution of Cubism, fresh from Europe. He and Weir were the oldest exhibitors, nicknamed at a press dinner as "the mammoth and the mastodon of American Art". Hassam viewed the new art trends from abroad with alarm, stating "this is the age of quacks, and quackery, and New York City is their objective point."[53] He was also displeased that the Armory Show drew attention away from the latest exhibits of The Ten.
In 1913, Hassam was honored with a separate gallery showing at the
The Flag series
The most distinctive and famous works of Hassam's later life comprise the set of some thirty paintings known as the "Flag series". He began these in 1916 when he was inspired by a "Preparedness Parade" (for the US involvement in World War I), which was held on Fifth Avenue in New York (renamed the "Avenue of the Allies" during the Liberty Loan Drives of 1918).[55] Thousands participated in these parades, which often lasted for over twelve hours.[56]
Being an avid Francophile, of English ancestry, and strongly anti-Germany, Hassam enthusiastically backed the Allied cause and the protection of French culture.
Final years
In 1919, Hassam purchased a home in
He denounced modern trends in art to the end of his life, and he termed "art boobys" all the painters, critics, collectors, and dealers who got on the bandwagon and promoted Cubism, Surrealism and other avant-garde movements.[67] Until a revival of interest in American Impressionism in the 1960s, Hassam was considered among the "abandoned geniuses". As French Impressionist paintings reached stratospheric prices in the 1970s, Hassam and other American Impressionists gained renewed interest and were bid up as well.[36]
Gallery
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A Back Road, Brooklyn Museum
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Meadows, Brooklyn Museum
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Montauk, Brooklyn Museum
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The Gorge, Appledore, Brooklyn Museum
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Sterling Turner
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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The Victorian Chair
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Summer Sunlight
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Improvisation
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The Bather, 1905. Private collection.
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Mt. Beacon at Newburgh, 1916
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April - (The Green Gown)
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Girl in a Modern Gown, 1922, National Gallery of Art
References
Notes
- ^ a b c d e Stewart, Doug (August 2004). "Impressionism's American Childe". Smithsonian Magazine.
- ISBN 9781588391193.
- ^ May, Stephen (December 1990). "An Island garden, a poet's passion, a painter's muse". Smithsonian Magazine.
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 13.
- ^ "United States Census, 1880," database with images, FamilySearch(https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MHXC-JTG : August 26, 2017), Norvall Hassam in household of Fred F Hassam, Hyde Park, Norfolk, Massachusetts, United States; citing enumeration district ED 518, sheet 614D, NARA microfilm publication T9 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.), roll 0548; FHL microfilm 1,254,548.
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 13
- ^ a b c Hiesinger 1994, p. 14
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 16
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 17
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 18
- ^ a b c d e f Hiesinger 1994, p. 10
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, pp. 25–26
- ISSN 0098-7484.
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 20
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 31.
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 27
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 32
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 34
- ISBN 0789205874.
- ^ a b c Hiesinger 1994, p. 50
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 57
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 58
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 64
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 65
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 42
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 63
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 181
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 69
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 70
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 77
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 76
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 78
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 86
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 99
- ^ a b c Hiesinger 1994, p. 104
- ^ a b Bullock 2004, p. 12
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 115
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, pp. 115–116
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 116
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 122
- ISBN 978-1-904832-77-5.
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 124
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 135
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, pp. 127, 131
- ^ Bullock 2004, p. 57
- ^ Bullock 2004, p. 41
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 141
- ^ a b c Hiesinger 1994, p. 142
- ^ "July Fourteenth, Rue Daunou, 1910". www.metmuseum.org. Retrieved October 8, 2019.
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 150
- ^ "The South Ledges, Appledore by Childe Hassam / American Art". Americanart.si.edu. Retrieved January 21, 2014.
- ^ Bullock 2004, p. 47
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 153
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 155
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 156
- ^ a b Fort 1988, p. 71.
- ^ Fort 1988, p. 9
- ^ Fort 1988, p. 10
- ^ Fort 1988, p. 15
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 165
- ^ Souza, Pete (September 6, 2010), President Barack Obama holds a conference call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in the Oval Office, Labor Day, Sept. 6, 2010, Official White House Flickr photostream (displaying painting hanging in background of photograph); local copy available at File:Barack Obama in the Oval Office in september 2010.jpg
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 157
- ^ Hiesinger 1994, p. 168
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 170
- ^ "Gratz Gallery - Biography of Louise Woodroofe". gratzgallery.com. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
- ^ "Childe Hassam". Olympedia. Retrieved July 27, 2020.
- ^ a b Hiesinger 1994, p. 171
Sources
- Bullock, Margaret E. (2004). Childe Hassam: Impressionist in the West. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 1-883124-19-0.
- Fort, Irene Susan (1988). The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam. New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-1169-8.
- Hiesinger, Ulrich W. (1994). Childe Hassam: American Impressionist. New York: Prestel-Verlag Publishing. ISBN 3-7913-1364-9.
Further reading
- Hiesinger, Ulrich W. (1991). Impressionism in America: the Ten American Painters. Munich: Prestel-Verlag. ISBN 3-7913-1142-5.
- Weinberg, H. Barbara (October 2004). "Childe Hassam (1859–1935)". Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Kiehl, David W. (1977). Childe Hassam as printmaker : a selection in various media, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.