Childe Hassam
American, 1859-1935

The Manhattan Club, 1891 ca.
oil on canvas
18 1/4 x 22 1/8 in.

SBMA, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sterling Morton for the Preston Morton Collection
1960.62



Self-Portrait, 1914

“Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain.” - Childe Hassam

RESEARCH PAPER

The Manhattan Club by Childe Hassam is also titled The Stewart Mansion, New York City. It is an oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 22 1/8", painted in 1891. Childe Hassam was born in the United States in 1859. He grew up in Massachusetts, in the town of Dorchester, near Boston. As a young boy, Childe would play with American antiques his father collected. Among the antiques was an old carriage that Hassam liked to climb in and paint with watercolors scenes from the family barn. At age thirteen, his father’s business was destroyed by a fire, which also destroyed much of Boston’s commercial district. The family had financial problems and Hassam was forced to leave high school before graduating in order to find work.

Childe Hassam became a draftsman and produced designs for commercial engraving. He began to paint privately in the open air, a practice then considered peculiar to many. Hassam worked in watercolors and oils, usually centering on rural scenes of rain, snow, mist, moonlight, as well as, bright sunny days. He was interested in painting scenes from his own time, often of American cities, especially New York and Boston.

Hassam made his first trip to Europe in 1883 at the age of twenty-four. He was especially impressed with the watercolors and drawings of J.M.W. Turner. In the early 1880’s, he met poetess Celia Thaxter. Thaxter was much older than Hassam, but invited him to her summer home on the Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast. Over the next few summers, he painted many pictures of this area. In the Boston winters, Hassam was particularly fond of urban scenes on rainy days and nights when streets were misty and the lights and shadows reflected off the shiny surfaces.

In 1886, Hassam returned to Europe with his wife, Maude. They settled in Paris and Childe attended the Académie Julian. He was most interested in seeing the work of Barbizon painters, Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet. He continued to paint street scenes with horse-drawn carriages and well-dressed people, under different light and weather conditions. By 1889, Hassam’s Paris paintings were becoming popular in America. In the summer of 1889, Hassam created a number of paintings recording Bastille Day celebrations, the beginning of his famous flag paintings.
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The Hassam’s returned to America in October 1889 and settled in New York City. A notable change in Hassam’s work, resulting from his Parisian experience, was his heightened palette and looser, broken brush stroke, influenced by impressionist painting. The French impressionists painted with sketchy strokes of different sizes to create the effects of light, air, and movement of a scene, rather than to describe the physical details.

Hassam began painting scenes of the leisured, affluent life in one of New York’s oldest neighborhoods, not far from where he lived. Our painting, The Manhattan Club, was a famous landmark, the Civil War mansion of Alexander Turney Stewart, located at the intersection of Thirty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, which had recently become the Manhattan Club.

Often Hassam would hire a horse-drawn cab as a makeshift studio, using the small seat in front of him as an easel. He did this to give a close up view of people walking the streets, as in our Manhattan Club. The brush strokes are irregular and sketchy, giving the painting a sense of motion and liveliness. The diagonal lines of the street and crosswalk add to the feeling of activity. The colors are pale lavenders and pinks, with the exception of the lady in the foreground dressed in red and black. Our eye is definitely drawn to her. The horse-drawn carriages show this scene to be before cars were invented. The building behind (The Manhattan Club) is actually four stories high, so the artist has cropped the painting, both the height and the width. The painting appears as a street scene of fashionably dressed people through the window of a carriage. It is a snap shot in time, like a stop frame of a movie or a photograph. We are looking out a window directly at the street scene that includes a dog and newspaper boy in the foreground.

This picture was painted during the height of American Impressionism, the period from 1890-1893. In 1891, the year The Manhattan Club was painted, Gauguin settled in Tahiti, Van Gogh exhibited at the Salon des Indépendents, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec produced his first music hall posters.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Dorothy Warnock
March 26, 1997

Bibliography
Fort, Ilene Susan, Childe Hassam’s New York, Pomegranate Artbooks, San Francisco,
California, 1993.
Fort, Ilene Susan, The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam, Exhibition Catalogue,
Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association
with Harry N. Abrams, 1988.
Grun, Bernard, The Timetable of History, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1991.
Hiesinger, Ulrich W., Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, Prestel: Munich and
New York, 1994.
Mead, Katherine Harper, ed., The Preston Morton Collection of American Art, Santa
Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, 1981.




Photograph of A. T. Stewart Mansion, northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, ca. 1889.

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

“I paint from cabs a good deal,” Hassam told an art journalist, when interviewed for a piece that appeared in an issue of Art Amateur in 1892. In so doing, Hassam was emulating the Parisian street scene specialist, Jean Béraud, with whom he was often compared. Driving along the fashionable neighborhoods of Fifth Avenue, Hassam captured on-the-spot the elegant facades of the mansions and clubs, as well as the well-heeled New Yorkers who patronized them. During the 1890s, Hassam was known as the painter of New York street scenes such as this, culminating in his most famous Impressionist Flag Series of 1916-1919, which commemorated the end of World War I.

- Preston Morton Reinstallation, 2022