Childe Hassam - Poppies (Poppies, Isles of Shoals) [1891]

Childe Hassam - Poppies (Poppies, Isles of Shoals) [1891], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This painting shows the view from Celia Thaxter's flower garden on the Isles of Shoals toward an outcropping called Babb's Rock. Although one could see ample signs of man's presence from Thaxter's garden, Hassam usually excluded them from his paintings. Here, only a sailboat passing in the distance hints that we are not in a pristine, wild environment. The composition is arranged with three distinct and equal bands of space. In each zone different colours predominate: green and red for the flowers; blue, purple, and white for the rocks and water; and pale blue for the sky. Hassam's brushwork is equally varied, ranging from lush red and white strokes defining the flowers to long drags of pigment to suggest the multihued surfaces of the rocks. At the bottom he left areas of canvas bare, adding yet another colour and texture.

[National Gallery of Art, Washington - Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 61 cm]

Childe Hassam - Winter in Union Square [1889-90]

Childe Hassam - Winter in Union Square [1889-90], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 46.4 x 45.7 cm]

Childe Hassam - The Water Garden [1909]

Childe Hassam - The Water Garden [1909], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This intimate landscape, with its strong rhythmic composition, flattened space, and tapestry-like application of paint, illustrates the modification of Hassam's style at the turn of the century when he absorbed Post-Impressionist developments. The painting is thought to have been executed on the property of a friend in East Hampton who had a beautiful lily pond surrounded by irises. Hassam was later to buy his own home in East Hampton, where he spent long periods during the last sixteen years of his life.

[Oil on canvas, 61 x 91.4 cm]

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]

Childe Hassam - Allies Day, May 1917 [1917]

Childe Hassam - Allies Day, May 1917 [1917], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Hassam had studied in Paris from 1886-1889 and was strongly influenced by the impressionists. In many respects, Allies Day resembles the vibrant boulevard paintings of Monet and Pissarro. Like these contemporary French artists, Hassam selected a high vantage point overlooking a crowded urban thoroughfare to achieve an illusion of dramatic spatial recession. But, rather than using daubs of shimmering pigment to dissolve form, he applied fluid parallel paint strokes to create an architectonic patterning. Although he shared the impressionists' interest in bright colours, broken brushwork, and modern themes, Hassam's overall approach was less theoretical and his pictorial forms remained far more substantial than those of his European contemporaries.

[Oil on canvas, 92.7 x 76.8 cm]

Childe Hassam - Tanagra (The Builders, New York) [1918]

Childe Hassam - Tanagra (The Builders, New York) [1918], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In Tanagra (The Builders, New York), Childe Hassam painted an ambivalent image of modern life. At the turn of the twentieth century, the skyscraper symbolised all that was dynamic and powerful in America. Architects praised the new towers as symbols of mankind's reach for the heavens. But as the United States grew in power and prestige, the workers who provided the nation's muscle also seemed to threaten Hassam's orderly and prosperous world. 

The artist had won fame and fortune picturing New York for the delight of its moneyed class; the art, music, and fine manners surrounding this "blond Aryan girl" provided a buffer against the unruliness of America's immigrant society. If the skyscraper represents worldly ambition, the other vertical elements in the painting (the lilies, the Hellenistic figurine, the panels of a beautiful oriental screen) suggest a different kind of aspiration. But in 1918, the refined life this woman pursued in her elegant environment was already under attack by the reality of war and the clamour of a new century.

[Oil on canvas, 149.2 x 149.0 cm]

Childe Hassam - Old House [1917]

Childe Hassam - Old House [1917], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches]

Childe Hassam - April Showers, Champs Elysees Paris [1888]

Childe Hassam - April Showers, Champs Elysees Paris [1888], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The greatest of the American Impressionists, Hassam (1859 - 1935) began his artistic career in 1876 as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines such as Scribner's, Century, and Harper's. In the early eighties, Hassam developed a style that reflected both academic realism and Barbizon School influences. By the mid eighties, Hassam was working with a carefully limited palette to produce evocative urban scenes, especially of gray, rainy days. In 1886, Hassam went to Paris for three years, where he entered the Académie Julien to refine his figure technique and, outside the Académie, absorbed the influence of Impressionism, enhancing his sense of colour and light. April Showers, with its loose brushwork and spontaneous texture, clearly shows Hassam's debt to European Impressionism while at the same time remains true to the artist's partiality for depicting inclement weather.

[Oil on canvas. 31.8 x 42.5 cm]

Frederick Childe Hassam - The White Dory, Gloucester [1895]

Frederick Childe Hassam - The White Dory, Gloucester [1895], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

This painting was sold by Sotheby's on December 3, 2009 for US $3,666,500.

[Oil on canvas, 66 x 53.3 cm]

Frederick Childe Hassam - Rainy Day, New York [1892]

Frederick Childe Hassam - Rainy Day, New York [1892], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

This painting was sold by Sotheby's on December 2, 2010 for US $1,538,500.

[Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 31.8 cm]

Childe Hassam - The Victorian Chair [1906]

Childe Hassam - The Victorian Chair [1906], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

[Oil on wood, 76.3 x 63.5 cm]

Frederick Childe Hassam - Nude in Sunlit Wood [1905]

Frederick Childe Hassam - Nude in Sunlilt Wood [1905], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Frederick Childe Hassam (Dorchester, Boston, Massachusetts, October 17, 1859 – East Hampton, New York, August 27, 1935) was a prominent and prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. 

After a brief period of depression and drinking as part of an apparent mid-life crisis, the forty-five year old Hassam then committed himself to a healthier life style, including swimming. During this time he felt a spiritual and artistic rejuvenation and he painted some Neo-Classical subjects, including nudes in outdoor settings. His urban subjects began to diminish and he confessed that he was tiring of city life - as bustling subways, elevated trains, and motor buses supplanted the graciousness of the horse-drawn scenes he was so fond of capturing in earlier times.

[Oil on canvas, 54.61 x 72.39 cm]