54 Facts About Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes.

Childe Hassam produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.

Childe Hassam was born in the family home on Olney Street on Meeting House Hill in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, on October 17,1859.

Childe Hassam's father, Frederick Fitch Hassam, was a moderately successful cutlery businessman with a large collection of art and antiques.

Childe Hassam descended from a long line of New Englanders.

Childe Hassam's father claimed descent from a seventeenth-century English immigrant whose name, Horsham, had been corrupted over time to Hassam.

Childe Hassam had his first lessons in drawing and watercolor while attending The Mather School, but his parents took little notice of his nascent talent.

Childe Hassam left high school after two years, and by 1880 his family had moved to nearby Hyde Park.

Childe Hassam quickly proved an adept "draughtsman" and produced designs for commercial engravings such as letterheads and newspapers.

In 1882, Childe Hassam became a free-lance illustrator, and established his first studio.

Childe Hassam specialized in illustrating children's stories for magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Scribner's Monthly, and The Century.

Childe Hassam continued to develop his technique while attending drawing classes at the Lowell Institute and at the Boston Art Club, where he took life painting classes.

Childe Hassam began to add a crescent symbol in front of his signature, the meaning of which remains speculative, possibly an allusion to his penchant for implying Middle Eastern or Turkish origins.

Sixty-seven of the watercolors that Childe Hassam painted on this trip formed the basis of his second exhibition in 1884.

Childe Hassam was particularly influenced by the circle of William Morris Hunt, who like the great French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, emphasized the Barbizon tradition of working directly from nature.

Childe Hassam had moved to France to study figure drawing and painting at the prestigious Academie Julian.

Childe Hassam sent these works back to Boston and their sale, combined with that of older watercolors, provided him with sufficient income to sustain his stay abroad.

Childe Hassam was likely inspired by French Impressionist paintings which he viewed in museums and exhibitions, though he did not meet any of the artists.

Childe Hassam eventually became one of the group of American Impressionists known as "The Ten".

Childe Hassam resumed his studio illustration and in good weather produced landscapes out-of-doors.

Childe Hassam found a studio apartment at Fifth Avenue and 17th Street, a view that he painted in one of his first New York oils, Fifth Avenue in Winter.

Childe Hassam painted garden and "flower girl" scenes, some featuring his wife, including Geraniums which he presented at the Salon exhibition in 1889.

Childe Hassam managed to exhibit at all three Salon shows during his Paris stay but won only one bronze medal.

Childe Hassam contributed works from his European stay to several exhibitions and shows.

Childe Hassam enthusiastically painted the genteel urban atmosphere of New York that he encountered within walking distance of his apartment, and avoided the squalor of the lower-class neighborhoods.

Childe Hassam's primary focus would forever continue to be "humanity in motion".

Childe Hassam never doubted his own artistic development and his subjects, remaining confident in his instinctual choices throughout his life.

The urban scene provided its own unique atmosphere and light, which Childe Hassam found "capable of the most astounding effects" and as picturesque as any seaside scene.

Thaxter died in 1894, and in tribute Childe Hassam painted her parlor in The Room of Flowers.

Childe Hassam's impression has been growing more and more bleary-eyed.

Childe Hassam continued producing paintings with a very light palette.

Back in New York in 1897, Childe Hassam took part in the secession of Impressionists from the Society of American Artists, forming a new society known as The Ten.

The group was energized if not initiated by Childe Hassam, who was among the most radical of members.

The ship featured in Childe Hassam's work was paid for by a Chicago millionaire and was the first large ship to be built in Provincetown in a quarter of a century.

Childe Hassam was astute in marketing his work, and was represented by dealers and museums in several cities and abroad.

Childe Hassam produced over 100 paintings, pastels, and watercolors of the High Desert, the rugged coast, the Cascades, scenes of Portland, and even nudes in idealized landscapes.

Childe Hassam sold his apartment studio and has sold more pictures this winter, I think, than ever before and is really on the crest of the wave.

When he returned to New York, Childe Hassam began a series of "window" paintings that he continued until the 1920s, usually featuring a contemplative female model in a flowered kimono before a light-filled curtained or open window, as in The Goldfish Window.

Where his friend Weir might paint six canvases in a season, Childe Hassam would do forty.

Childe Hassam displayed six paintings at the landmark Armory Show of 1913, where Impressionism was finally viewed as mainstream and nearly an historical style, and displaced by the clamor over the radical revolution of Cubism, fresh from Europe.

In 1913, Childe Hassam was honored with a separate gallery showing at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, featuring thirty-eight pictures.

Childe Hassam began these in 1916 when he was inspired by a "Preparedness Parade", which was held on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Childe Hassam even considered volunteering to record the war in Europe, but the government would not approve the trip.

Childe Hassam was even arrested for innocently sketching naval maneuvers along the city's rivers.

Claude Monet, among other French artists, had painted flag-themed works, but Childe Hassam's have a distinctly American character, showing the flags displayed on New York's most fashionable street with his own compositional style and artistic vision.

Childe Hassam makes a patriotic statement without overt reference to parades, soldiers, or war, apart from one picture showing a flag exclaiming "Buy Liberty Bonds".

Flag paintings by Childe Hassam are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art.

In 1919, Childe Hassam purchased a home in East Hampton, New York.

The post-war art market boomed in the 1920s, and Childe Hassam commanded escalating prices, though some critics thought he had become static and repetitive, as American art had begun to move on to the Realism of the Ashcan School and artists like Edward Hopper and Robert Henri.

Childe Hassam's work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.

Childe Hassam traveled relatively little in his last years, but did visit California, Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico.

Childe Hassam died in East Hampton in 1935, at age 75.

Childe Hassam denounced modern trends in art to the end of his life, and he termed "art boobys" all the painters, critics, collectors, and dealers who got on the bandwagon and promoted Cubism, Surrealism and other avant-garde movements.

Until a revival of interest in American Impressionism in the 1960s, Childe Hassam was considered among the "abandoned geniuses".