^
>Born on 17 October 1859: Frederick
Childe Hassam, US impressionist painter, etcher,
and illustrator who died on 27 August 1935.
— The son of Frederick F. Hassam, a prominent Boston merchant, and
his wife, Rosa P. Hathorne, he was initially trained as an apprentice to
a wood-engraver. From the late 1870s to the mid-1880s he made drawings for
the illustration of books, particularly children’s stories. He had a long
affiliation with the Boston firm of Daniel Lothrop & Co., for whom he illustrated
E. S. Brooks’s In No-man’s Land: A Wonder Story (1885), Margaret
Sidney’s A New Departure for Girls (1886) and numerous other books.
— Hassam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts and educated at the
Boston Art School and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Hassam was the
chief US exponent of impressionism. His primary objective both in his paintings
and in his etchings was to represent the effects of sunlight in city scenes
and in landscapes of rural New England. His works include July 14 Rue
Daunon (1910) and Church at Gloucester (1918). Hassam is remembered
primarily for the sparkling effects that he achieved.
— Son of prosperous merchant and antiquarian. Studied in Boston under
I.M. Gaugengigl, and at the Académie Julian in Paris under Boulanger
and Lefebvre until 1883. Spent five years in France, influenced by Monet.
Became of the leading exponents of American Impressionism or "luminism".
Worked as a painter and illustrator after return from Europe. In 1898 helped
to found "The Ten", a group of rebels against the conservative American
Academy. Influenced by Whistler. Began to etch in 1898 but these plates
not completed until 1915. In 1917 began to experiment with lithography,
but his lithographs were not commercially successful.
— LINKS
— The
Etcher Self-Portrait (etching, 120kb)
— Isles
of Shoals (1899, 64x77cm; 1/3 size, 849kb _ ZOOM
to 2/3 size, 3483kb)
— Isles
Of Shoals (1912, 46x56cm)
— Isles
of Shoals (34x24cm)
— The
Lady of the Gorge (56x61cm; 747x800pix, 214kb _ ZOOM
to 1382x1480pix, 617kb) _ Elle ne porte pas de soutien-gorge, ni aucun autre
vêtement.
— Boston
Common at Twilight (106x152cm; 562x800pix, 63kb _ ZOOM
to 1199x1707pix, 288kb)
— Bathing
Pool, Appledore ( 63x75cm; 666x800pix, kb _ ZOOM
to 1305x1568pix, 415kb) _ From 1886 to 1916, Hassam made regular summer
visits to Appledore, the largest of nine rugged islands that make up the
Isles of Shoals about ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire. Drawn to
the island by its natural beauty and leisure activities, Hassam was also
attracted by the salon and garden of the poet and writer Celia Laighton
Thaxter, whose family owned the resort hotel and who welcomed writers, musicians,
and artists to the flower-filled parlor of her cottage. Hassam's illustrations
of Thaxter's garden adorn her book An Island Garden, published in 1894 just
before her death. Hassam had built a studio home on Appledore and continued
to visit after Thaxter's death, although he no longer painted its lush floral
landscapes, concentrating instead on images of rocks and sea. In Bathing
Pool, Appledore he depicted the resort life of the island in the foreground,
including swimmers in the pool area in front of colorful bathhouses and
strollers in the midday sunshine. Beyond the vacationers stretches a benign
sea studded with the domical Babb's Rock and other granite outcroppings,
skillfully conveyed by the artist using an elevated viewpoint, active brush
work, and a light, bright palette.
— Le
Jour du Grand Prix (61x78cm; 623x800pix _ ZOOM
to 1262x1621pix, 361kb) _ In 1887 Hassam altered his style when he painted
this in light colors that captured the effect of a bright sunny day, rather
than using the darker, more tonal palette he had previously preferred (as
in Boston Common at Twilight). He depicted the parade of fashionably
dressed Parisians on their way to the Grand Prix at Longchamps in the Bois
de Boulogne, an important horse race held annually in June (see Degas, Race
Horses at Longchamps). Hassam exhibited a second, larger version, entitled
Le Jour du Grand Prix, at the Salon of 1888. He described the picture
to fellow artist Rose Lamb, “I am painting sunlight…a 'four in hand'
and the crowds of fiacres filled with the well dressed women who go to the
'Grand Prix.'" Probably portraying the chestnut-tree-lined Avenue Bois de
Boulogne (now Foch), with the Arc de Triomphe partially visible to the left,
Grand Prix Day demonstrates Hassam's adaptation of Monet's color and brush
strokes and the compositional devices (cropping and empty foreground) often
utilized by Degas and Caillebotte to provide a glimpse of modern Parisian
life. However, Hassam's more restrained form of Impressionism, influenced
by the work of Giuseppe de Nittis and Jean Béraud, is evident in the solidity
and detail of the horses, carriages, and figures.
— Le
Jour du Grand Prix (1888; 355x450pix, 26kb) _ Inaugurated in 1863, the
Grand Prix was a 3000-meter race for three-year-old horses from any country,
held at the Longchamp track in the recently relandscaped Bois de Bologne.
The final race in the spring season, the Grand Prix signaled the closing
of the society season before the vacations of summer. In 1887, the Grand
Prix was held on the first Sunday of June. The brilliant sunlight and abbreviated
shadows in Hassam's painting indicate a time shortly after noon, the hour
that racegoers thronged to the Bois. There, people like those Hassam depicts
would spend the early afternoon picnicking, sipping Champagne, eyeing one
another's costumes, and placing their bets. The races at Longchamp has earlier
been portrayed by French Impressionists Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, who
depicted the jockeys and spectators at the track. Like a true Parisian,
Hassam was attuned to the subtle gradations of status signalled in the fashions
and equipages portrayed in his painting. The most prominent vehicle is a
road or mail coach, which was popular for the races because it gave its
passengers an unobstructed view over the crowd. Since it required a stable
of at least four horses, plus alternate vehicles for bad weather, the mail
coach was an obvious sign of wealth. Furthermore, unlike the victoria (two-passenger
coach) and laundau (four) also depicted in Hassam's painting, the mail coach
was not available to rent. The women atop the mail coach wear pastel dresses
and high-crowned, narrow-brimmed hats trimmed with feathers or flowers.
Their clothing, significantly brighter than that worn by the spectators
on foot, suggests an attention to fashion. Every spring, French periodicals
illustrated costumes for the races that were far more elaborate than those
for social calls, promenades, or even dinners. This painting is closely
related to the study of the same scene listed above. The study, smaller
in scale and more subdued in color, was painted first. Hassam recreated
the brilliant sunshine of this painting some six months later. "Just now
. . . I am painting sunlight," he wrote to a friend in November 1887, explaining
that colleagues who had seen his smaller version of the subject had urged
him to paint it larger. “I hope I shall do it as well as the smaller
one which I though was successful in some ways,” he added. Hassam
made few changes to the composition, but brightened the palette and loosened
his brushwork. The carefully calculated result marked his first decisive
foray into Impressionism.
— Charles
River and Beacon Hill (41x46cm; 723x800pix, 156kb _ ZOOM
to 1359x1505pix, 481kb) _ In this painting Hassam employed the radical compositional
effects that he had seen in French painting to portray changing aspects
of Boston. Like Caillebotte and other French Impressionists, he used dramatically
plunging recession and a broad expanse of empty foreground to draw the viewer
into his cityscape, which includes three of Boston's important topographical
features. On the left is the Charles River which divides the city from Cambridge.
In the center is Beacon Hill, settled in the 18th century and the site of
the gold-domed State House, and on the right is the Back Bay, a fashionable
residential area created over the previous forty years by the filling of
tidal flats. As Hassam was no doubt aware, there had been much discussion
in Boston as to how to take best advantage of the Charles River. Hassam
showed the dirt road and narrow walkway along the embankment, and he drew
attention to the river via the boat landing and the blue-coated man at the
railing smoking his pipe. Shortly thereafter, the scene was altered when
a one-hundred-foot-wide concrete promenade was constructed beyond the sea
wall. Here Hassam captured the city of his youth as it was transforming
itself into a sophisticated urban center.
— Old
Fairbanks House, Dedham, Massachusetts (56x56cm; 804x800pix, 161kb _
ZOOM
to 1434x1428pix, 414kb)
— Chatou
near Bougival (25x35cm; 584x800pix, 78kb _ ZOOM
to 1222x1675pix, 286kb)
— Blossoming
Trees (27x23cm; 1135x800pix _ ZOOM
to 1704x1201pix, 344kb)
— Canterbury
(34x24cm; 1111x800pix, 181kb _ ZOOM
to 1686x1214pix, 347kb)
— Spanish
Street (31x41cm; 598x800pix, 76kb _ ZOOM
to 1237x1655pix, 350kb)
— The
Knolls, New Hampshire (25x35cm; 574x800pix, 123kb _ ZOOM
to 1212x1689pix, 403kb)
— Lady
Reading (49x31cm; 1179x800pix, 196kb _ ZOOM
to 1737x1179pix, 350kb) rough watercolor sketch
— Winter,
Midnight (1894; 1600x1108pix, 915kb)
— A
Rainy Day (1600x803pix, 635kb).
— Bridge
at Old Lyme (1908, 60x65cm; 1364x1500pix, 233kb)
–- Easter
Morning aka Portrait at a New York Window (1921, 94x65cm; 1181x805pix,
139kb; _ .ZOOM
to 2372x1612kb, 871kb) the woman seems to be suffering from some disease
that gives her skin a light violet hue.
— California
(1919, 61x110cm; 1/4 size, 387kb)
— The
Fireplace (1912, 14x21cm)
— Bricklayers
(1900, 26x21cm)
— Houses
of Parliament, Early Evening (1898, 33x42cm)
— Boy
with Flower Pots (1888, 46x38cm)
— Columbus
Avenue (1886, 18x27cm)
— Le
Jour du Grand Prix (1888; 152kb)
— Celia
Thaxter in her Garden (1892; 170kb)
— Flower
Girl (1888; 146kb)
— At
the Piano (1908; 170kb)
— Tanagra
(The Builders, New York) (1918, 149x149cm; 500x500pix, 61kb) _ About
the time of World War I, Hassam's images become elaborate prescriptive programs
requiring a lot of decoding if their deeper messages are to be read. They
always continue to work also as beautiful paintings with glowing light and
luscious impressionist surfaces, and this is generally how they are understood
today. Hassam's occasional comments or writings are key to delving beneath
these surfaces to the meaning that underpins the images.
The title Tanagra (The Builders, New
York) refers to a Hellenistic statuette a woman holds directly in front
of a narrow view out a window where construction workers are raising a skyscraper.
The painting is from The Window Series that Hassam began in 1899 with Improvisation
and continued until the early 1920s. Each work in the series shows a refined
woman in an interior, many painted in Hassam's studio, the intimate space
where the artist felt most involved with his art. As always, the canvas
is rigorously organized, a perfect square, with a circle on a circle defining
the horizontal plane, and the vertical plane behind the figure organized
into four roughly even panels, three of them filled by an Asian screen and
one opening out to a window ledge and a distant view glimpsed through the
open curtain. The effect is to divide the painting into zones, each containing
a clue or symbol that contributes to the overall meaning.
Hassam wrote a note (with improvised spelling
corrected here) to accompany the painting when it was exhibited, explaining
the two-part title by saying, "Tanagra, the blond Aryan girl holding
a Tanagra figurine in her hand against the background of New York buildings,
one in the process of construction and the Chinese lilies springing up from
the bulbs, is intended to typify and symbolize growth, the growth of a great
city, hence the subtitle The Builders, New York."
This brief passage indicates a complex association
of thoughts. One is the idea of social Darwinism which suggests that human
beings evolve in the social and cultural spheres, just as Darwin taught
was true of the physical evolution of species. This "new species"
evolving is the US woman, destined to guard and protect civilization in
what would be known as the "American Century." Like so many of
his contemporaries, Hassam believed in Aryan superiority, but here genetic
advantage is enhanced by associations with the most ancient Greek and Asian
civilizations. In Tanagra the woman merges with the oriental screen through
her gown, which mimics the swallow and chrysanthemum pattern and colors.
Her figure also echoes the delicate statuette, one from a cache of graceful
female figurines unearthed in the village of Tanagra in Boethia, in east-central
Greece, in 1874 and immediately heralded as the pinnacle of antique art.
 Well-dressed
young women in various positions, usually standing or sitting, are the main
subject matter of the terra-cotta statuettes. On occasion the figures pull
their garments around them closely, veiling the face, or they may wear a
hat or hold a fan or mirror. The Tanagra figurines [an example >>>]
were all manufactured with molds, but the use of separate molds in combination
(different arms, heads) lent interesting variation. The figures were all
originally covered with a white coating and then painted. The garments were
generally bright shades, blue, red, pink, violet, yellow, and brown. The
flesh was reddish or pinkish, the hair auburn, the lips red, and the eyes
blue. Gilt and black were used for details. The delicate pieces were widely
imitated intheir own time, with Tanagra work spanning the period from about
340 BC to 150 BC. The earliest figurines unearthed from the necropolis along
the Asopós River focus on divinities; later pieces represent a variety of
familial and domestic themes, particularly the female Graces. The finest
examples, from the late 4th and 3rd centuries, compare favorably with the
life-size work of the great masters of classical Greece, which they not
infrequently imitated. The authentic statuettes that survive are missing
their white coating and bright paint. On their discovery they became enormously
popular and were extensively and expertly forged, even with paint.
The sprouted bulbs on the windowsill and
the full-blown hybrid roses on the table echo the themes of growth and breeding,
a reminder that the people of the US must be worthy inheritors of the future
they are building. They must be bred and cultivated to be careful guardians
of the world's inheritance of civilization.
Coming in 1918 as the United States was fighting
to defend Europe, Tanagra grows out of Hassam's feeling that the
nation's values and culture were threatened. By focusing on the legacy of
civilization and stressing the slow evolution required for its refinements,
he encoded his fear that the spirit of the US's founders was being diluted
through immigration. The number of foreign-born people in the US doubled
between 1880 and 1930 to more than fourteen million. The polyglot populations
of big cities like New York and Chicago sharply altered the nation's cultural
profile, despite the desire of most immigrants to assimilate as soon as
possible. The fear of cultural fragmentation and social upheaval mounted
each year until the Immigration Act of 1924, which drastically reduced the
number of new persons admitted. The law also froze the ethnic status quo,
saying, for instance, that if 20% of the US's population was made up of
people of Irish origin, then only 20% of the new immigrants each year could
come from Ireland. This formula guaranteed that Anglo-Saxon dominance in
the United States would not be further eroded. In Tanagra, Hassam
cautions that social change may happen quickly through immigration and skyscrapers,
but the growth of civilization is evolutionary, requiring many generations.
He subscribed to a kind of cultural Manifest Destiny, echoing the ideas
of Herbert Spencer, the great British exponent of social Darwinism, who
said on a trip to New York in 1882:
“The eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race forming
the population will produce a finer type of man than has hitherto existed,
and a type of man more plastic, more adaptable, more capable of undergoing
the modifications needed for a complete social life. . . . Americans may
reasonably look forward to a time when they will have produced a civilization
grander than any the world has known.”
This optimistic view of 1882 seemed to Hassam
in 1918 in danger of being overtaken by the rapid pace of change.
–- The
Alhambra (1127x1400pix, 143kb) It was the summer palace of the Caliphs
in Granada, Spain.
–- S*>#The
Toll Bridge, New Hampshire, Near Exeter (x799pix, 80kb)
–- S*>#Paris
Street Scene (x799pix, 79kb)
–- S*>#Golf
in Early Spring, East Hampton, New York (x799pix, 101kb)
–- S*>#Evelyn
Benedict at the Isles of Shoals (799xpix, 75kb)
–- S*>#Sunrise,
Autumn (x800pix, 55kb)
–- S*>#Sammie's
Beach, Easthampton (800xpix, 101kb)
–- S*>#Tulip
Tree Blossom (x800pix, 73kb)
–- S*>#Haystacks
(x800pix, 84kb)
–- S*>#East
Hampton Elms in May (x800pix, 134kb)
–- S*>#Blossoms
(x800pix, 100kb)
–- S*>#A
Paris Nocturne (800xpix, 74kb)
–- S*>#The
Rose Garden (800xpix, 103kb)
—(071014) |
