Most critics and patrons consider Childe Hassam one of the finest impressionist painters from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He began his artistic career as a self-trained wood engraver working for Little, Brown & Company in Boston, signing his work F. Childe Hassam. After studying drawing with Englishman Walter Smith in Boston, by 1876 he dropped the F from his signature and signed his paintings confidently Childe Hassam. By this time he was successfully illustrating for Scribner’s, Harper’s, St. Nicholas and Century magazines and learned how to paint the anatomy during lessons from friends at the Boston Art Club (and possibly with Ignaz Manuel Gaugengigl at Boston’s Lowell Institute).

In 1882, Hassam, Enneking and George Fuller painted together at the Tremont Street Studio Building, and Hassam went by boat to Nantucket to paint Fishing Skiffs, Nantucket, 1882 (see color plate). By this time, the artist was a competent painter, capable of subtle color washes combined with academic drawing. The following year Hassam went to Paris with close friend Edmund H. Garrett and painted in Great Britain, Holland, Spain and Italy, then returned to America to marry and travel to paint in Appledore, an island off the coast of Maine. In Appledore he resided and painted at the home of Celia Thaxter. In 1886, the Hassams settled in Paris, having a small apartment at ll Boulevard Clichy near the Palace Pigalle and Hassam began a three year study at the Academie Julian. Although Hassam was intrigued with the impressionistic works of Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, he was more highly influenced by the work of his academically oriented teachers at the Academie and during the 1880s adhered to their academic style and approach to painting. He added his own sense of values, light and color to Americanize the French traits he liked the most, while he continued to illustrate for American magazines.

Hassam painted Manhattan flag scenes after he visited France in 1910, he became mesmerized with the motion of flags that hung from stark or static buildings. He painted several flag series from 1910-1916, celebrating Armistice Day, the Avenue of the Allies and the Fourth of July parties in and around New York City. Because no one else had painted flag scenes with such patriotic fervor before Hassam did, he became known as an innovator and a patriot who painted American heritage.

Like his French contemporaries, Hassam painted many series (like Monet did) after 1910 including flags; street scenes; Isle of Shoals rocks and sea; hollyhocks in gardens; rocky coasts with nude female figures (that often take on a stick-figure, sterile, cold appearance); a Havana and an Oregon series. In most of these paintings, Hassam’s primary interest is in color, not form.

One Thanksgiving, Hassam, J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman sat in a New York City apartment talking of how art clubs in America showed a lack of support to native artists trained in Paris and Germany. Taking note of the lack of patronage in America, Hassam was pleased that New York offered a better opportunity than did staid, conservative Boston. Later D.W. Young said of Hassam, “[He was] a virile, vital definite personality, as alive as a breath of fresh air, and a complete antithesis of the lay ideas that artists were effeminate creatures. There was nothing of the Boston Brahmin or puritan about him; his roots went into a soil much more earthly.” (The Life & Letters of J. Alden Weir, 1960). Paris had removed any starch under Hassam’s collar and he went at life, art and the artistic world with guts and gusto. With nine of his friends, Hassam left the National Academy of Design rosters to publicly denounced the NAD as a group that harmed American art and artists. With the group they formed dubbed The Ten American Painters, in 1898 the group became the nucleus for the most famous, well respected, competent American painters who had trained in Paris and together they exhibited whatever they pleased without jurors and with wide public acclaim.

Unlike many members of The Ten, Hassam was an able etcher as well as a painter in pastel, watercolor and oil. His brushwork is often poetical and lyrical in his early work and the academic foundation with which he learned to draw allowed him the freedom in his later canvases to stretch and grow artistically into a uniquely talented Impressionist. His brisk, delicate brush simplified objects and forms by placing emphasis on flat patterns in shapes, while surfaces were built up with short, dry, positive strokes. As his work became more daring and forcefully rendered he became known as “The Sisley of Madison Avenue.” His colors were bold and brilliant and stimulate visual excitement and his best work after 1900 is unified with color, style and feeling.

Hassam was a master at contrasting effects. Never vulgar or outlandish, his subjects remained graceful and sensuous. At his best, he intertwined and fused figures into genre views, land and coastal scapes that appear natural, unified and transitory (see illustrations The South Ledges, Appledore, 1913 and the etching The Beach, East Hamton, 1921) He was not burdened or encumbered with his materials or technical formulas. His figures move, sit, talk and walk, contemplate and react to their environment naturally as they bake in the sun (see Little Good Harbor Beach, 1919).

Ameen Rihani wrote of Hassam in 1920, “Sensuousness was indeed a fascination for him, a lure; but through the magic of his art, it is transformed into a majesty in which the sensuous is lost.” His work often has a lyrical poise and idyllic grace, where luminosity, tranquil calm and natural landscapes seem voluptuous.

Because of his patron John Fox of Brookline (who purchased over 100 Hassam canvases with the intention of opening a museum), Hassam’s financial success allowed him to paint freely without too much concern for making ends meet. He painted more prolifically than any other members of The Ten and this accounts for much of his unevenness after 1910. Hassam painted at J. Alden Weir’s home in Branchville, Connecticut and in Old Lyme, Gloucester, Cos Cob and in Maine and New York. Collectors believe his most desirable paintings are those he painted in Paris prior to 1889 and his streets scenes of New York painted before 1893 because those years were ones in which Hassam produced canvases with technical control and care. These canvases employ both the academic and impressionistic techniques that were upheld as superior in an era of change but none of Hassam’s genre scenes salute either school of painting in a rigid or firm manner.

Throughout his career, Hassam diligently defended art and artists regardless of the school from which they came. He believed in freedom of expression and dynamically upheld any artist’s right to paint as he or she wished and he devoted his life to any group that released artists from strict institutional standards and rules.

By the time Hassam died in East Hampton, New York on August 27, 1935, he was known as one of the most sought after, famous, opinionated men in American art. He demonstrated his devotion to art and artists by bequeathing all of his painting to the American Academy of Arts and Letters “with the provision that they be sold to establish a fund for the purchase of works by American and Canadian artists, which would be donated to museums.”  He was an active member in many art organizations and won almost every conceivable painting award for excellence. Before his first one-man show in 1900 he had exhibited in over 80 group shows and by the time of his death he had been given more honors and one-man shows than almost any American artist.

Throughout art history, patrons and museum curators have sought to purchase the early works of American and European masters rather than their later works, and this is the case with Childe Hassam probably because his Parisian canvases and those painted in New York City prior to 1893 are those with which he built his artistic reputation and they established the firm foundation for life-long career in art. Although Hassam’s later canvases and watercolors that come from a pure impressionistic aesthetic are unique and beautifully rendered, many of his later canvases appear to be awkward, have stilted perspectives, often look flat and unrealistic in color, or have stiffly drawn figures, whereas his canvases that predate 1893 do not.