Childe Hassam (1859-1935)

The following essay is adapted from the 1982 publication Dallas Collects American Paintings: Colonial to Early Modern: An Exhibition of Paintings from Private Collections in Dallas.

Born in Dorchester, the son of a Boston merchant, Childe Hassam developed his talent for drawing in a Boston wood-engraving shop and learned the fundamentals of painting from the little known artist I.M. Gaugengigl. An association with landscape painters of the Boston Art Club introduced him to plein air methods. In 1883 he went abroad for the first time and in 1886 returned to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and came under the sway of Impressionism. After his return to America in 1889, Hassam settled in New York and for the rest of his life worked mostly in New York while painting during the summers in New England at Old Lyme, Cos Cob, Gloucester, and Isles of Shoals. In 1897 he made a trip abroad to England, France, and Italy. The following year he became a founding member of the secessionist group, The Ten American Painters, and taught for a year at the Art Students League. A one·man exhibition at the Montross Gallery in 1905 was followed by subsequent annual shows, and in 1906 he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design. In 1920 he established a summer studio in Easthampton, where he died in 1935. Hassam was one of the leading American painters of his day and is the American Impressionist most closely linked with the perceptual realism of French Impressionism while also displaying certain highly personal and American characteristics.

Steven A. Nash, "Childe Hassam (1859-1935)", in Dallas Collects American Paintings: Colonial to Early Modern: an exhibition of paintings from private collections in Dallas, ed. Robert V. Rozelle (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 83.

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