Childe Hassam
Frederick Childe Hassam was a prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.
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 (a division of MIT) and at the Boston Art Club, where he took life painting classes.
Having had relatively little formal art training, Hassam was advised by his friend (and fellow Boston Art Club member) Edmund H. Garrett to take a two-month "study trip" with him to Europe during the summer of 1883. Hassam and Garrett 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 Hassam did on this trip formed the basis of his second exhibition in 1884.
In 1886, Hassam and his wife moved to France so that he could study figure drawing and painting at the prestigious Académie Julian.] Although he took advantage of the formal drawing classes with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre, he quickly moved on to his own self-study, finding that "the 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." His first Parisian works were street scenes, employing a mostly brown palette, and he sent these works back to Boston for sale, which, combined with older watercolors, provided the couple with sufficient income. After returning to the United States and moved to New York in 1889, he resumed his studio illustration and in good weather produced landscapes out-of-doors. He found a studio apartment at Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street, a view he painted in one of his first New York oils, Fifth Avenue in Winter. Through the 1890s, his technique veered increasingly toward Impressionism in both oil and watercolor. He committed himself to a healthier life style. 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. The architecture of the city changed as well. Stately mansions gave way to skyscrapers, which he admitted had its own artistic appeal. Hassam's urban paintings took on a higher perspective and humans shrink in size accordingly. In 1904 and 1908, he traveled to Oregon and was stimulated by new subjects and diverse views, frequently working out-of-doors. 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. The most distinctive and famous works of Hassam's later life compose the set of about thirty paintings known as the "Flag series". He began these in 1916 when he was inspired by a "Preparedness Parade", for the American involvement in World War I, which was held on Fifth Avenue in New York. 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.
