Childe Hassam
American, 1859-1935

High Bridge, New York, 1922
oil on canvas
23 1/2 x 29 3/4 in.

SBMA, Bequest of Margaret Mallory
1998.50.37

COMMENTS

American painter and printmaker. The son of Frederick F. Hassam, a prominent Boston merchant, and his wife, Rosa P. Hathorne, he was initially trained as an apprentice to a wood-engraver. From the late 1870s to the mid-1880s he executed drawings for the illustration of books, particularly children’s stories. He had a long affiliation with the Boston firm of Daniel Lothrop & Co., for whom he illustrated E. S. Brooks’s In "No-man’s Land: A Wonder Story" (1885), Margaret Sidney’s "A New Departure for Girls" (1886) and numerous other books.

Hassam’s first significant body of non-graphic work was in watercolour. He executed a group of freely washed, light-filled drawings of local landscapes, which provided the basis for his first one-man show in 1882 at the Boston galleries of Williams & Everett. Hassam attended evening classes at the Boston Art Club and by 1883 had a studio on Tremont Street in Boston. His early career was established by his watercolours rather than by his few oils, which were thickly painted landscapes inspired by the Barbizon school. In 1883 he visited Europe for the first time, with fellow artist Edmund C. Garrett (1853–1929). Over 60 bright, illustrative watercolours from this trip were exhibited in Boston in 1884. During the mid-1880s Hassam established himself in Boston as a painter of urban street scenes, employing a tonalist style that emphasized atmospheric conditions, as in "Rainy Day in Boston" (1885; Toledo, OH, Mus. A.).

Late in 1886 Hassam and his wife, Kathleen Maud (née Doane), departed for France and spent the next three years abroad. They settled in Paris, and Hassam began lessons in drawing at the Académie Julian with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. His work of these years reflects his growing awareness of the French Impressionists; he consistently used broken brushstrokes, and his palette rapidly became brighter (e.g. "Grand Prix Day", c. 1887–8; New Britain, CT, Mus. Amer. A.). Hassam’s Parisian oils and watercolours depict the more genteel and picturesque aspects of urban life: Montmartre shops, flower vendors, parks and private gardens. Although he adopted an Impressionist brushstroke, he retained a sense of solidity and form in his figures, creating a hybrid style that is characteristic of American Impressionism. Hassam preferred to consider himself a painter of ‘light and air’ in a general sense rather than be labelled an Impressionist, and he believed that the work of the French Impressionists was derived from earlier sources, particularly English art of the 18th century.

In 1889 Hassam settled in New York. He continued to depict the urban scene, a genre with which he became so closely identified that a monograph entitled "Three Cities" (New York, 1899) was devoted to reproductions of his imagery of Paris, London and New York. In the summer seasons he travelled to artistic resorts throughout New England. Around 1884 he visited Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off the Maine–New Hampshire coast, and he returned there repeatedly during the early 1890s to produce some of his finest and most sophisticated Impressionist watercolours and oils. His friendship with Mrs Celia Thaxter, a poet and patron of the arts who owned a local hotel, inspired him to execute a series of extremely impressionistic pictures of her opulent flower gardens, including his splendid watercolour "The Island Garden" (1892; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.).

By 1892 Hassam was exhibiting regularly at the annual exhibitions of most of the major art institutions on the East Coast, including the Boston Art Club, American Water Color Society, National Academy of Design, New York Water Color Club, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Art Club. He achieved considerable success during this decade and was able to support himself by the sale of his pictures. In 1896–7 he and his wife spent 18 months in Europe, visiting Italy, France and England. His work from this trip indicates his continued adherence to an Impressionist style but reveals also a heightened palette and a new rigid, aggressive brushstroke. In addition to vivid colour, Hassam’s pictures of 1897–8 show his awareness of Post-Impressionist and Symbolist art. As well as dazzling urban scenes (e.g. "Pont Royal, Paris"; Cincinnati, OH, A. Mus.), he executed numerous works in Normandy and Brittany, particularly in the village of Pont-Aven.

In 1898 he helped to organize the first exhibition, in New York, of the Ten American Painters, with whom he shared a desire to exhibit recent work in an environment both less constrictive and less aesthetically diverse than that of a major academy. Despite Hassam’s avowed distrust of modern art, his own 20th-century work reflects his growing interest in the abstract and decorative qualities of paint on a surface. Around 1900 he explored symbolic and anti-naturalistic subject-matter, producing many mythically titled nudes (e.g. "Pomona", 1900; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.). Although Hassam believed many of these pictures to be among his finest, they did not find as receptive an audience as his more naturalistic landscapes.

Between 1900 and 1910 Hassam continued to live and work in New York, during the warmer months visiting the artistic colonies at Cos Cob and Old Lyme, CT; his brand of Impressionism influenced not only students and amateur artists who gathered there, but also fellow American Impressionists such as Julian Alden Weir and Willard Leroy Metcalf. In the summers of 1904 and 1908 Hassam stayed in Oregon with his friend Colonel Charles E. S. Wood (1852–1944), a lawyer by profession but also an amateur painter, poet and patron of the arts. In addition to executing a mural for Wood’s residence, Hassam produced over 40 bright impressionistic landscapes of the stark eastern Oregon desert, which were exhibited at Montross Galleries, New York, in 1909.

In 1910 and 1911 Hassam made his final trips to Europe, where he painted the Bastille Day celebration in Paris, "July Fourteenth, Rue Daunou" (1910; New York, Met.); this work prefigures his renowned series of flag paintings produced in New York between 1916 and 1918 depicting the patriotic parades along Fifth Avenue (‘Avenue of the Allies’) during World War I (e.g. Allies Day, May 1917, 1917; Washington, DC, N.G.A.).

At the age of 55 Hassam embarked on a career in printmaking, executing over 350 etchings and 40 lithographs. He depicted both the bustling activity of urban life, as in his etching "Fifth Avenue, Noon" (1915), and the charms of rural existence in his many landscapes, some including colonial cottages. His etchings were admired by contemporaries for their impressionistic technique. In 1919 he purchased an early 18th-century cottage in the Long Island community of East Hampton, NY, a gathering place for artists. He returned there and painted each summer for the next 15 years, depicting the lush farmlands and expansive beaches. Hassam persisted in producing such symbolic paintings as the overtly mythological "Young Apollo and the Flying Swan" (1921; East Hampton, NY, Guild Hall Mus.), perhaps with a nostalgic yearning not atypical of aging artists or the post-war period. Hassam left his entire artistic estate to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, with instructions that the works be sold to establish a fund supporting young American and Canadian artists by purchasing their work for museum collections.

- Kathleen M. Burnside, Grove Art Online, 2012

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Childe Hassam is one of the most versatile and prolific artists among the American Impressionists and the first to gain substantial renown as a painter of urban scenes. Though he spent significant time painting views of cities like Paris, Rome, Venice, Havana, Cordoba, and his native Boston, it was perhaps most distinctly during his time in New York City that he became recognized as a preeminent recorder of the modern cityscape in America. Of particular interest to him were architectural scenes, including skyscrapers, Fifth Avenue vistas, and bridges, which emblematized American innovation and culture. High Bridge, depicted here, is New York City’s oldest bridge and was a beloved subject for painters and photographers, especially in the early twentieth century. Hassam’s use of deep perspective and a high vantage point offer a sweeping view of the landmark bridge blanketed in the subtle blue, gray, and white hues of fresh snow as simulated by the staccato brushwork and layering of pastel tones.

- Let It Snow, 2018