HASSAM, Childe

Hassam began to make a name for himself with rainy or snowy city scenes.

Hassam painted a series of paintings in the second decade of the twentieth century which document his patriotic feelings during the First World War. The pictures, such as the Allies Day, May 1917, transform the flagged buildings of New York into a sea of fluttering colour. In some degree Hassam’s painting was inspired by Monet’s Rue Saint-Denis in Paris, Celebration of 30 June 1878.

Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835-1894) was an American writer of poetry and stories. As the hostess of her father’s hotel, the Appledore House on Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals, she welcomed many New England literary and artistic notables to the island and to her parlor, including writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the artists William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam, who painted several pictures of her.

Hassam began to make a name for himself with rainy or snowy city scenes. In 1886, he went to Europe, this time to Paris. In this period he began to use a more Impressionist technique and colourism. Grand Prix Day, painted in 1887, is generally cited as the earliest work in his changed style. His palette brighter, his accentual colour contrasts strong, Hassam has turned away from the rain to a sunny summer’s day and a crowd on their way to the big June races at Longchamp in the Bois de Boulogne.

Childe Hassam can be seen as the model Impressionist in America. His Boston and New York cityscapes represented the only American Impressionist art beside Cassatt’s to couple stylistic innovation with contemporary subject-matter. He began to make a name for himself with rainy or snowy city scenes such as Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston. His palette moves in subtle nuances across closely related colours, nicely catching a city atmosphere. Though the choice of colours recalls mainstream American tonalism, the subject prompts comparison with the realistic Paris street scenes of De Nittis or B�raud as well as with Caillebotte’s 1877 Paris Street, Rainy Day.

Hassam also painted landscapes. He probably first summered on Appledore, an island off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine, in 1884. For many years until 1894, the Appledore landscape provided Hassam with inspiration. Later he continued to visit both Appledore and New England coastal towns in the summers. The seascapes he painted on those visits in the early years of the twentieth century introduced a new component into his work. In Sunset at Sea, for instance, the almost monochrome bands of colour record a vision of the vastness of the ocean, in a style that has Symbolist undertones and looks forward to American abstract art.

The American Childe Hassam made a long trip to Europe in 1883, during which he spent part of the time studying at the Acad�mie Julian. He liked to paint street scenes and was influenced by the naturalism of Giuseppe de Nittis and Jean B�raud.

Hassam also painted landscapes. he probably first summered on Appledore, an island off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine, in 1884. For many years, the Appledore landscape provided Hassam with inspiration.