Childe Hassam
(American, 1859–1935)
Biography
Childe Hassam was an American painter best known for his impressionistic depictions of Boston, New York, and the countryside and coastline of New England. Hassam along with J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twatchman helped introduce what came to be known as American Impressionism to museums, dealers, and younger artists during the 1890s. Among Hassam’s most famous paintings are his depictions of the boisterous flag-draped streets of New York at the onset of World War I. “The man who will go down to posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him,” he once reflected. Born Frederick Childe Hassam on October 17, 1859 in Dorchester, MA, he grew up in a well-to-do family before his father lost his business in a fire. Trained as a draftsman at a wood engraving shop, Hassam opened his own commercial illustration company in 1881. Having already made significant strides in both watercolor and oil painting, in 1886 he traveled to Paris where he studied at the famed Académie Julian. Returning to New York three years later, he began depicting American scenes with the pastel palette and broken brushstrokes of the French Impressionists. The artist died on August 27, 1935 in East Hampton, NY. Today, Hassam’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art among others.
Childe Hassam Artworks
Childe Hassam
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