Childe Hassam

Early years

Hassam was known to all as "Childe" (pronounced like child), a name taken from his uncle. Hassam was born in the family home on Olney Street on Meeting House Hill in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, on October 17, 1859. His father, Frederick Fitch Hassam (1825–1880), was a moderately successful cutlery businessman with a large collection of art and antiques. He descended from a long line of New Englanders. His mother, Rosa Delia Hawthorne (1832–1880), a native of Maine, shared an ancestor with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. His father claimed descent from a seventeenth-century English immigrant whose name, Horsham, had been morphed over time to Hassam. With his dark complexion and heavily lidded eyes, many took Childe Hassam to be of Middle Eastern descent—speculation that he enjoyed stoking. In the mid-1880s, he took to painting an Islamic-appearing crescent moon (which eventually degenerated into only a slash) next to his signature, and he adopted the nickname "Muley" (from the Arabic "Mawla", Lord or Master), invoking Muley Abul Hassan, a fifteenth-century ruler of Granada whose life was fictionalized in Washington Irving's novel Tales of the Alhambra.

Hassam demonstrated an early interest in art. He had his first lessons in drawing and watercolor while attending The Mather School, but his parents took little notice of his nascent talent.

As a child, Hassam excelled at boxing and swimming at Dorchester High School. A disastrous fire in November 1872 wiped out much of Boston's commercial district, including his father's business. Hassam left high school after two years (at age 17), and by 1880 his family had moved to nearby Hyde Park. Despite his uncle's offer to pay for a Harvard education, Hassam preferred to help support his family by working. His father arranged a job in the accounting department of publisher Little, Brown & Company. During that time, Hassam studied the art of wood engraving and found employment with engraver George Johnson. He quickly proved an adept "draughtsman" and produced designs for commercial engravings such as letterheads and newspapers. Beginning to paint artistically, his preferred medium was watercolor, mostly outdoor studies, and around 1879 began creating his earliest oils.

Career

Early career

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. 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.

By 1883, Hassam had exhibited watercolors in his first solo exhibition at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston. 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, possibly an allusion to his penchant for implying Middle Eastern or Turkish origins.

Having had relatively little formal art training, Hassam was advised by his friend and fellow Boston Art Club member Edmund H. Garrett to join him on a two-month "study trip" to Europe during the summer of 1883. They traveled throughout the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain, studying the Old Masters together and creating watercolors of the European countryside. Hassam was particularly impressed with the watercolors of J. M. W. Turner. Sixty-seven of the watercolors that Hassam painted on this trip formed the basis of his second exhibition in 1884. During this period, Hassam taught at the Cowles Art School. He also joined the "Paint and Clay Club", expanding his contacts in the art community, which included prominent critics and "the readiest and smartest of our younger generation of artists, illustrators, sculptors, and decorators—the nearest thing to Bohemia that Boston can boast." Friends found him to be energetic, robust, outgoing, and unassuming, capable of self-mockery and considerate acts, but he could be argumentative and wickedly witty against those in the art community who opposed him. Hassam was particularly influenced by the circle of William Morris Hunt, who like the great French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, emphasized the Barbizon tradition of working directly from nature. He absorbed their credo that "atmosphere and light are the great things to work for in landscape painting." In 1885, a noted critic, in part responding to Hassam's early oil painting A Back Road (1884), stated that "the Boston taste for landscape painting, founded on this sound French school, is the one vital, positive, productive, and distinctive tendency among our artists today...the truth is poetry enough for these radicals of the new school. It is a healthy, manly muscular kind of art."

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.

Back in New York in 1897, Hassam took part in the secession of Impressionists from the Society of American Artists, forming a new society known as The Ten. The group was energized if not initiated by Hassam, who was among the most radical of members. Their first show at the Durand-Ruel Gallery featured seven of his new European works. Critics dismissed his new work as "experimental" and "quite incomprehensible". Though still interested in including figures in his urban paintings, his new summer works done at Gloucester Harbor, Newport, Old Lyme, and other New England locales show increasing attention to pure landscapes and buildings. His time at the Old Lyme Art Colony, beginning in 1903, caused a shift of the entire colony's output away from the muted colors of Tonalism towards American Impressionism. As his colors became paler and closer in tone to Monet's, which many viewers found unsettling and unfathomable, he was asked how he came up with a particular palette. He responded that "subjects suggest to me a color scheme and I just paint."

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.

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." 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. In 1906, he was elected Academician of the National Academy of Design.

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."

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!" In the midst of the vibrant city, Hassam painted July Fourteenth, Rue Daunou during the Bastille Day celebrations, a forerunner of his famous Flag series (see below).

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). 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!" 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.

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. This painting shows the famous writer Celia Thaxter's home in Appledore Island. The South Ledges, Appledore is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.

He also produced some still-life paintings.

Hassam displayed six paintings at the landmark Armory Show of 1913, where Impressionism was finally viewed as a mainstream and nearly 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." He was also displeased that the Armory Show drew attention away from the latest exhibits of The Ten.

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). Thousands participated in these parades, which often lasted for over twelve hours.

Being an avid Francophile, of English ancestry, and strongly anti-German, Hassam enthusiastically backed the Allied cause and the protection of French culture. The Hassams joined with other artists in the war relief effort from nearly the beginning of the conflict in 1914, when most Americans, as well as President Woodrow Wilson, were decidedly isolationist. Hassam considered volunteering to record the war in Europe, but the government would not approve the trip. He was even arrested (and quickly released) for innocently sketching naval maneuvers along the city's rivers. In addition to the time he gave to many committees, several of his flag pictures were contributed to the war relief in exchange for Liberty Bonds. Although he had great hopes that the entire series would sell as a war memorial set (for $100,000), the pictures were sold individually instead after several group exhibitions, the last at the Corcoran Gallery in 1922.

Claude Monet, among other French artists, had also painted flag-themed works, but Hassam's have a distinctly American character, showing the flags displayed on New York's most fashionable street with his own compositional style and artistic vision. In most paintings in the series, the flags dominate the foreground, while in others the flags are simply part of the festive panorama. In some, the American flags wave alone and in others, flags of the Allies flutter as well. In his most impressionistic painting in the series, The Avenue in the Rain (1917), which has been in the White House permanent collection since the Kennedy administration, the flags and their reflections are blurred so extremely as to appear to be viewed through a rain-smeared window. On entering the White House, Barack Obama chose to display it in the Oval Office. Hassam's flag paintings cover all seasons and various weather and light conditions. Hassam makes a patriotic statement without overt reference to parades, soldiers, or war, apart from one picture showing a flag exclaiming "Buy Liberty Bonds". Flag paintings by Hassam are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art.

Final years

In 1919, Hassam purchased a home in East Hampton, New York. Many of his late paintings employed nearby subjects in that town and elsewhere on Long Island. The post-war art market boomed in the 1920s, and Hassam commanded escalating prices, though some critics thought he had become static and repetitive, as American art had begun to move on to the Realism of the Ashcan School and artists like Edward Hopper and Robert Henri. In 1920, he received the Gold Medal of Honor for lifetime achievement from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and numerous other awards through the 1920s. In 1925 he was featured on 32nd Annual Exhibition of American Art at the Cincinnati Art Museum, together with Louise Woodroofe, Robert Henri and Mary Cassatt. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics. Hassam traveled relatively little in his last years, but did visit California, Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico. He died in East Hampton in 1935, at age 75.

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. Until a revival of interest in American Impressionism in the 1960s, Hassam was considered among the "abandoned geniuses". As French Impressionist paintings reached extremely high prices in the 1970s, Hassam and other American Impressionists gained renewed interest and were bid up as well.