Childe Hassam Biography.

Also Known as: F. Childe Hassam, Frederick Childe Hassam

Born:

Dorchester, Massachusetts 1859

Died:

East Hampton, New York 1935

Active in:

California
Oregon
New York, New York
Boston, Massachusetts
Isles of Shoals, New Hampshire

Biography

Painter and illustrator. Hassam was a leading American Impressionist whose work was much influenced by Claude Monet. His landscapes, street scenes, and interior scenes were both popularly and officially recognized.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection(Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

Frederick Childe Hassam, the scion of an old New England family (his surname is a corruption of Horsham), grew up in the upper-middle-class suburb of Dorchester, Massachusetts. His father, a Boston merchant and hardware store owner, collected Americana well before this hobby became a popular pastime. He passed this interest in history along to his son. It is telling that the future artist first dabbled with a brush while sitting in the old coach that carried the Marquis de Lafayette through New England on his triumphal tour in 1824–25! Hassam, like many of his fellow artists, traveled to Europe for instruction in the 1880s and eventually settled in New York. Exposed to the full measure of urban hustle and bustle, Hassam returned to the past as often as he could and during the last forty years of his life traveled from one historic summer resort to the next, painting picturesque villages and towns throughout New England. The past is therefore a living presence in Hassam's art. While his village scenes may appear quaint, they are also active statements about the importance of traditional New England values and institutions in an era of great change.

William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, editors, with contributions by Dona Brown, Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Judith K. Maxwell, Stephen Nissenbaum, Bruce Robertson, Roger B. Stein, and William H. Truettner Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory(Washington, D.C.; New Haven, Conn; and London: National Museum of American Art with Yale University Press, 1999)

(Frederick) Childe Hassam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, at that time an affluent suburb of Boston. The family was of old Puritan stock and related to architect Richard Morris Hunt and his brother, Barbizon painter William Morris Hunt. As a youth Hassam studied and practiced wood engraving, painted in watercolor, and studied anatomical painting with the venerable William Rimmer at the Lowell Institute in Boston. When he was twenty-two he journeyed to museums throughout Europe and in 1886 commenced a three-year course of study at the Académie Julian in Paris.

Before his departure for Europe he had already attracted attention and displayed his considerable skills with a number of paintings of Dorchester streets. These were freely brushed, tonalist works, poetic depictions of evening light reflected on rain-soaked pavement, with dramatic use of perspective.
But Hassam emerged from his stay in Paris profoundly influenced by the techniques and sensibilities of the impressionist movement. It lightened his palette, encouraged use of the broken brush stroke and the juxtaposition of contrasting hues, and moved him in the direction of becoming the most assertively impressionist of American painters. But unlike many of his French contemporaries, the American insistence on form and contour prevailed in his work. Ironically, Hassam never openly acknowledged his indebtedness to the impressionists, insisting that his artistic lineage descended from Constable, Turner, and Bonington.
On his return to America he settled in New York, where he became a close associate of J. Alden Weir and John Twachtman. Eventually, Weir and Twachtman both purchased rural properties in coastal Connecticut and used their homes as focus for much of their painting. Hassam, however, remained peripatetic, coursing up and down the New England coast, painting what struck his fancy, from Old Lyme, Connecticut, to the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire. In Old Lyme he frequented the boarding house of Florence Griswold, now a museum of the paintings of other young impressionists who boarded there. And there he painted some of his most charming and redolent depictions of the churches, homes, and tree-lined streets of an old New England village.
He also lived and worked at Appledore in the Isle of Shoals at the rambling hotel owned by the resident poetess, horticulturist and doyenne, Celia Thaxter. Years before, Hassam had instructed her in watercolor and now returned summer after summer to exercise his newfound impressionist skills on the rocky coastline, the abundant flora, and Appledore's gracious hostess. It was Thaxter, incidentally, who recommended he use his more romantic and Byronic middle name for professional use.


It was at Hassam's instigation that Twachtman and Weir joined him in founding that loose affiliation, Ten American Painters. Dissatisfied with the size and increasing mediocrity of annual exhibitions of the Society of American Painters, this rather heterogeneous group of New Yorkers and Bostonians chose to exhibit together and continued to do so annually for twenty years.
Around 1910 he essayed a series of decorative interiors posing clothed female figures before windows with outside light seen through translucent curtains.
Hassam devoted the last decade of his life largely to printmaking; he produced etchings, drypoints, and lithographs. At the height of his career, he had ten works accepted for the famed 1913 Armory Show, from which his older colleague, William Merritt Chase had been excluded.