Background

Ethnicity: Childe Hassam’s father was of a New England ancestry, and his mother came from Maine.

Childe Hassam, born as Frederick Childe Hassam, came to the world on October 17, 1859, in the Dorchester community of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was a son of Frederick Fitch Hassam, an owner of a moderate cutlery business, and Rosa Delia Hawthorne, a distant relative of an American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hassam’s father was an art admirer and possessed a rich collection of antiques and other pieces of art.

Hassam revealed his passion as well as his abilities for art at an early age. As a child, he found a hiding place to paint in tranquility in his father’s antique coach. The parents didn’t pay much attention to their son’s interest. It was Childe’s aunt who recognized his talent and helped the boy to get acquainted with local painters.

Education

Childe Hassam began his education at the Mather elementary School and at Dorchester High School. He studied French, German, Latin, Greek and was showed himself as a successful boxer and swimmer. It was this time when he received his first lessons in drawing and watercolor.

Hassam was obliged to leave the school at the age of seventeen to help his family after the destruction of his father's business by fire. However, the young man didn’t drop his artistic training. He attended the evening classes at the Lowell Institute and at the Boston Art Club where he learned figure drawing and figure painting respectively. Besides, Hassam developed his artistic skill assisting landscape painters on their plain-air sessions.

In 1883, Hassam accompanied his fellow from the Boston Art Club, Edmund H. Garrett, on his educational trip to Europe. Visiting the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Switzerland and Spain, the friends explored the art of the Old Masters and as contemporary artists, and developed his practical skills making watercolors of the European rural area.

Three years later, while visiting Paris, Childe Hassam briefly studied under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre at Julian Academy. Hassam left the institution because the curriculum seemed too scholastic for him.

Career

Childe Hassam started his career in 1876 working at the publishing firm in Boston ‘Little, Brown and Company’ where he did engravings and then made commercial designs for letterheads and periodicals. Hassam showed himself as a talented draughtsman that pushed him to try his hand in illustration of stories for children in various magazines, including ‘Harper's Weekly’, ‘Scribner's Monthly’ and ‘The Century’. Simultaneously, the young man experimented with oils and watercolor and quickly adopted the latter medium as his favored.

In 1881, Hassam established his own studio where he taught his first pupils. Within a year, Childe Hassam presented about fifty of his watercolors at his debut solo exhibition at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston.

This time Childe Hassam met a poet Celia Thaxter. Visiting her in the Appledore House hotel on the Isles of Shoals where she lived, the artist produced a great number of canvases showing the picturesque gardens of the writer and the local seashore. It was Thaxter who proposed Hassam to make his first trip to Europe in 1883.

During this two-months stint, Hassam explored the techniques of Impressionism which he adored and later adopted the style to his artworks. He also took interest in depicting city scenes and countryside areas which would remain one of the central subjects of his art throughout his lifetime. The first of such canvases included ‘Boston Common at Twilight’ and ‘Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston’. About sixty watercolor canvases Hassam brought from the journey were demonstrated to the public at his second solo show in Boston’s ‘Williams and Everett Gallery’ in 1884.

This time, the artist also taught art at the Cowles Art School and continued to enlarge his artistic circle joining various art clubs and associations. He exhibited actively showing his artworks at the local Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Water-Color Society, both in 1885, and at the American Art Association, the Society of American Artists and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the following year.

The same year, Childe Hassam, now accompanied by his wife, came back to Paris where he established a studio not far from the Place Pigalle. The artist continued to apply softer color pallet and freer brushwork of Impressionism using it for his series of urban and garden landscapes, such as Grand Prix Day. While at the capital of France, Hassam took part at all annual Paris Salons as well as at the Universal Exposition of 1889 and at the International Art Exhibition in Munich. In October of this year, Hassam returned to the United States settling in New York City.

On his return, the artist co-founded the New York Water Color Club and became its first president. He reestablished his studio at Fifth Avenue and at 17th Street and spent most of his time painting various city places on different seasons. These urban street scenes, such as ‘Washington Arch in Spring’ or ‘Union Square in Spring’ were more and more impressionistic and similar in style to canvases of the contemporary painters from France, including Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet. In addition to the subjects, Hassam also liked to use a woman in an interior as the character of his artworks.

Childe Hassam continued to enrich his artistic connections through various art associations, including the American Water Color Society where he developed a friendship with Julian Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman. He illustrated the poetry collection of his friend Celia Thaxter called ‘An Island Garden’.

In 1897, Childe Hassam along with Twachtman and Weir and other painters who withdrew the Society of American Artists formed the Ten American Painters Group also known as The Ten. The first exhibition of the Group took place the following year at Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York City where Hassam taught art at the Art Students League.

During the decade, Hassam successfully exhibited his pieces of art at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, at the National Academy of Design and at many expositions and art fairs.

At the beginning of the new century, tired with the busy city life, the artist restricted the number of his urban scenes. Instead, he traveled around Oregon painting the views of the High Desert and the Cascades. The series of idealized landscape appeared. By 1909, Hassam was widely sought for by galleries and art dealers that provided him with a great income.

A year later, the artist traveled again to Paris which had completely changed and somehow reminded him of New York City. Assisting the Bastille Day celebrations, Hassam created ‘July Fourteenth, Rue Daunou’ considered as the precursor of his famous ‘Flag series’. On his return to New York City, Childe Hassam set up other series the main subject of which became windows with women nearby.

In 1913, Hassam participated at the well-known Armory Show where he demonstrated six canvases. At the Panama-Pacific Exhibition organized in San Francisco the same year, his thirty-eight artworks were displayed in a separate gallery. This period, the artist also resumed his printmaking activity.

The World War I inspired Childe Hassam on his late series which depicted flags of different countries. The artist created in total about twenty-four paintings inspired by the festive events related to the war. One of the first flag paintings was dedicated to the ‘Preparedness Parade’ held to celebrate the involvement of the United States in World War I.

Among his late shows were the exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1927), the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo (1929), the Leonard Clayton Gallery and the Adam Clayton Gallery, both in New York City in 1933.

Achievements

• Childe Hassam was an accomplished and talented artist who made a great contribution to the development of American Impressionism.
  
  A prolific artist, Hassam produced in total about three hundred paintings, etchings and lithographs reflecting quick changes of the American urban life at the turn of the 20th century resulted from industrialization. This American subject matter influenced the content of the paintings made by such artists as Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, and Andrew Wyeth.
  
  Hassam was one of the founders of the influential art group dubbed ‘The Ten’.
  
  Over the course of his long and successful career, Childe Hassam was a recipient of many prestigious awards and prizes, including Paris Salon and Paris Universal Exposition Medals, Webb Prize from the Society of American Artists, Temple Trust Fund Gold Medal, Pennsylvania Academy Gold Medal of Honor for lifetime achievement and Joseph Pennell Memorial Medal.
  
  During the presidence of Barack Obama, the painting 'The Avenue in the Rain’ by Childe Hassam decorated the wall of the White House’s Oval Office. Other heritage of the painter can be found in many public collections around the United States, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, all in Washington, D. C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and elsewhere.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • A Back Road

  • A Rainy Day in Boston

  • Grand Prix Day

  • Blossoming Trees

  • Celia Thaxter's Garden, Appledore, Isles of Shoals

  • Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine

  • Isles of Shoals, Appledore

  • The Garden in Its Glory

  • Garden by the Sea, Isles of Shoals

  • An Isles of Shoals Day

  • Coast Scene, Isles of Shoals

  • Evening

  • The Avenue in the Rain

  • Avenue of the Allies

  • Italian day, May

  • Celebration Day

  • The Fourth of July

  • Flags on the Waldorf

  • The New York Bouquet, West Forty-Second Street

  • Victory Day, May

  • Bending Sail on the Old Mill

  • Sunlight on an Old House, Putnam

  • Spring Morning in the Heart of the City

  • Fifth Avenue at Washington Square

  • Horse Drawn Cabs at Evening, New York

  • Bleakk House, Broadstairs

  • Mrs. Hassam's Garden at East Hampton

  • Saint Patrick's Day

  • The Church at Gloucester

  • Outskirts of East Gloucester

  • New York Landscape

  • Little Old Cottage, Egypt Lane, East Hampton

  • The Goldfish Window

  • Back of the Old House

  • Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob

  • Morning Light

  • Boy with Flower Pots

  • The Fireplace

  • Lady in Furs

  • Little Cobbler's Shop

  • Clarissa

  • Sunset at Sea

  • Square at Sevilla

  • Cathedral at Ronda

  • At the Writing Desk

  • The Chinese Merchants

  • Thunderstorm on the Oregon Trail

  • Mount Hood

  • Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue

  • Lower Manhattan

  • The Hovel and the Skyscraper

  • Still Life, Fruits

  • Harney Desert Landscape

  • Messenger Boy

  • Jonquils

  • Provincetown Grocery Store

Views

Quotations: "The portrait of a city, you see, is in a way like the portrait of a person... The spirt, that's what counts, and one should strive to portray the soul of a city with the same care as the soul of a sitter."

"If taken individually a skyscraper is not so much a marvel of art as a wildly formed architectural freak... It is when taken in groups with their zigzag outlines towering against the sky and melting tenderly into the distance that the skyscrapers are truly beautiful."

"I was always interested in the movements of humanity in the street... There is nothing so interesting to me as people. I am never tired of observing them in everyday life, as they hurry through the streets on business or saunter down the promenade on pleasure."

"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."

"Even Claude Monet, Sisley, Pissarro and the school of extreme Impressionists do some things that are charming and that will live."

"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."

"I am often asked what determines my selection of subjects, what makes me lean towards impressionism. I do not know. I can only paint as I do and be myself, and I would rather be myself and work out my ideas, my vagaries, if you please, in color, than turn out Christmas cards and hire a clerk to attend to orders. I am often asked why I paint with a low-toned, delicate palette. Again I cannot tell. Subjects suggest to me a color scheme and I just paint."

Membership

• Paint and Clay Club , United States

• Society of American Artists , United States

• Lotos Club , United States

  1897

• National Academy of Design , United States

  1906

• American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

  1920

• New York City

  Pastel Society , United States

  1890

• Ten American Painters , United States

• New York Waterсolor Club , United States

• Boston Art Club , United States

• American Watercolor Society , United States

• at Isles of Shoals

  Appledore Art Colony

Personality

Childe Hassam was elegant in style. He liked to wear tweed costumes accompanied from time to time by a monocle.

Hassam’s friends and acquaintances described him as active, strong, sociable and modest, being up to self-mockery. He was always capable to find witty arguments in the debates with the people from art community who criticized him.

Besides, Childe Hassam had entrepreneurial spirit helping him to promote his art in the United States and abroad.

Physical Characteristics: Childe Hassam was often taken for an Arabian because of the dark color of his complexion and heavily lidded eyes. Besides, his surname made people think he came from Middle East.

Interests

• Barbizon school

• Artists

  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Connections

Childe Hassam married Kathleen Maud Doane on February 1, 1884. The marriage didn’t produce children.

Father:

Frederick Fitch Hassam

Mother:

Rosa Delia Hathorne

Spouse:

Kathleen Maud Doane

Friend:

Edmund Henry Garrett

mentor:

Gustave Boulanger

mentor:

Jules Joseph Lefebvre

Friend:

Julian Weir

Friend:

John Twachtman

Friend:

Theodore Robinson

friend, colleague:

Olaf Brauner

Painted together at Appledore Art Colony

References

• Childe Hassam The book briefly traces the life of the artist, shows a selection of his paintings, and assesses his place in American art
  1988
• Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited The book containing 105 full-color reproductions of beautiful Isles of Shoals series and and100 black-and-white photographs, provides the background essential to a full appreciation of these Hassam's artworks
  1990
• Childe Hassam: Impressionist Childe Hassam's impressive career as one of America's foremost Impressionists is celebrated and illuminated in this dazzlingly beautiful volume
  1999
• Childe Hassam, American Impressionist A book by H. Barbara Weinberg
  2004
• American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals An exploration of the fascinating connections between the Isles of Shoals and the beautiful paintings that Childe Hassam created there
  2016