Gavin Spanierman 2012

CHILDE HASSAM (1859– 1935) Childe Hassam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on October 17, 1855. He began his formal studies as an artist at the Boston Art Club (1878) and attended drawing classes at the Lowell Institute.The early portion of his artistic career was devoted to illustrations and watercolors. By 1892, at the age of twenty-three, Hassam was exhibiting publicly and had his first solo exhibition at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts. From this time forward, Hassam was committed to the life of a professional artist. In 1884, two years after he married Kathleen Maudï Doane, he set off for Paris to complete his artistic training at Academie Julian (1886–1889) Hassam was extremely active in the social aspects of the artistic community. In 1890, he founded the New York Water Color Club with several colleagues. He also joined the American Water Color Society, the Players Club, the Society of American Artists, and went on to found other artistic societies and join other clubs. The artists and collectors in New York regularly saw and purchased his work as a result of this exposure. The fruition of Hassam’s entrepreneurial fervor came in about in 1897 when he helped establish the Ten American Painters, an exhibiting group that included many of the finest artists of the day: Frank W. Bensen, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Dewing, John Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir. The artist and his wife were tireless travelers. Between 1888 and 1911 they visited Spain, Italy, England, and France. The couple traveled extensively in the U.S. and took regular holidays in East Hampton, Old Lyme, Greenwich, and Appledore Island off the coast of New Hampshire. This travel provided constant exposure to new landscapes and permitted the interchange of ideas and techniques with fellow artists. In 1919, Hassam purchased a home in East Hampton, New York, and many of his late paintings employed nearby subjects in the small Long Island town. The post-war art market boomed in the 1920s and 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, favoring artists like Edward Hopper and Robert Henri. In 1920, he received the Gold Medal of Honor for lifetime achievement from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and numerous other awards through the 1920s. Hassam died in East Hampton in 1935, at age seventy-five. Fromhis death until a revival of interest inAmerican Impressionism in the 1960s,Hassamwas considered among the “abandoned geniuses.” Since French Impressionist paintings reached stratospheric prices in the 1970s, however, Hassam and other American Impressionists have gained renewed interest. On The Balcony, 1888 Pastel on paper laid down on canvas 29⅝ x 17¾ inches Signed and dated lower right center: Childe Hassam 1888