Childe Hassam - Improvisation [1899]

Childe Hassam - Improvisation [1899], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1859 - East Hampton, New York, 1935) was the premier Impressionist painter of New York City. From 1890 through World War I he painted its fashionable boulevards, genteel park lanes, festive military parades, new neighbourhoods, and occasionally the new skyline that was prompting many to call New York the eighth wonder of the world. Like many American Impressionists, Hassam was a New Englander. A charter member of The Ten, he began drawing in the 1870s, studying in Boston under William Rimmer and the Munich academician, Ignaz Gaugengigl. Influenced by the tonalist painter, George Fuller, Hassam became well-known for his street scenes. He went to Paris in 1886, making numerous rural and urban plein-air paintings that put him in the centre of the emerging American Impressionist brotherhood. He returned to Boston in 1889, eventually settling in New York City.

[Oil on canvas, 76.3 x 86.2 cm]