Childe Hassam has become known as one of the most prolific American Impressionist painters, famous for his New York street cityscapes and pastoral New England landscapes. As art historian Donelson Hoopes claims, Hassam “was one of those fortunate artists to whom the physical act of painting was as natural as breathing and, seemingly, just as essential to life itself” (Hoopes, 9) and Hassam’s works have been admired ever since he began his fruitful and lucrative career. Indeed, at the time of his death in 1935, Hassam bequeathed three hundred oil paintings, ninety-two waterworlors and thirty pastels, a group that comprised solely of his favorite works and other unsold paintings, to the American Academy of Arts at Letters (Hoopes, 9).
Before he became the influential American Impressionist that he is known as today, Childe Hassam was born as Frederick Childe Hassam on October 17, 1859 in Dorchester, Massachusetts to parents Rosa Delia Hathorne and Frederick Fitch Hassam (Weinberg, 3). Artistic talent seems to have been in his genes as Hassam was related on his mother’s side to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the famous novelist and author of The Scarlet Letter, and on his paternal side to the less well-known painter, William Morris Hunt, and the architect, Richard Morris Hunt. In addition to these artistic relatives, however, Hassam also revered his many sea captain and Revolutionary War patriots and had a strong sense of patriotic pride even before producing the flag series, recounting that “[n]one of my ancestors became respectable for none of them became clergymen, but they always fought in every war (when not sailing the seven seas) for liberty” (qtd. Hassam, Hoopes, 10).
Hassam also took great pride in his Anglo-Saxon roots and his name, Hassam, is a corruption of the English name “Horsham” (Weinberg, 3). However, he also enjoyed the confusion created by the Arabic pronunciation of his name, Hassam. Indeed, he had his friends call him “Muley”, which is a play on “Mawla”, a word that means “Lord” or “Master” in Arabic (Weinberg, 3). So, in his artistic career, urged on by his friends, he decided to go by the name “Childe Hassam” which emphasized the confusion about possible Middle Eastern roots of his name and, thus, made his works seem more marketable and exotic (Weinberg, 4).
Never completing high school in Dorchester, where he had studied Greek, Latin, French and German, combined with a regimen of sports, Hassam initially took a job in the accounting department of the Boston publishing house Little, Brown and Company in 1876 (Hoopes, 10). Hassam, however, learned quickly that he was not cut out for the world of commerce and so departed to become an artist (Hoopes, 10). So he apprenticed himself to a wood engraver, learning how to engrave and make prints, and, at the same time, he began to work as a freelance illustrator, providing illustrations for many periodicals, as well as for books, the most famous of which being An Island Garden, the work of his friend Celia Laighton Thaxter, the New England poet (Hoopes, 10) and take art lessons, learning oil techniques through fellow artists and at practical schools, but never receiving formal anatomy training (Weinberg, 5).
Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doane in 1884 and the couple lived in Boston in the early 1880s, where he painted watercolor pictures of the streets and carriages as well as of the surrounding countryside areas (Weinberg, 5). Although his career was moderately successful in Boston, Hassam and his wife moved to Paris in 1886 in the hopes of gaining more financial success and artistic renown although he already had an artistic reputation (Hoopes, 12). In Paris, he immediately gained entry to the Académie Julian and was further influenced by the French Impressionist and academic art he saw there (Hoopes, 13). While he might have had an interest in the Impressionist movement, which had gained great momentum at the time, he never really considered himself an Impressionist nor wanted his work to be labeled as such (Hoopes, 13).
Images (from top to bottom)
E.S. Bennet. Childe Hassam, member of International Jury of Award, Carnegie Institute, 1904. 1904. Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Childe Hassam. Boston Common at Twilight. 1885-1886. Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.