Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam (October 17, 1859 - August 27, 1935) was an American Impressionist painter. He was born in Dorchester (Boston), Massachusetts.

Washington Arch, Spring (ca. 1893) Phillips CollectionHassam left high school without graduating and ended up working for a wood engraver. He attended drawing classes at the Lowell Institute, a division of MIT, and was a member of the Boston Art Club. He began his artistic career as an illustrator and watercolorist. By 1882 Hassam was exhibiting publicly and had his first solo exhibition, of watercolors, at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston. The following year he was convinced by his friend Celia Thaxter to drop his first name and thereafter was known as simply "Childe Hassam."

Having had little formal art training previously, Hassam went to Paris in 1886 to study figure drawing and painting at the Académie Julian. He studied under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. But he considered the education he received there "superfluous." What had a greater influence on Hassam's work was the art he was exposed to in the city's museums and galleries, especially the works of the Impressionists.

Hassam returned to America and settled in New York City in 1889. He soon become close friends with fellow artists J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman, whom he met through the American Watercolor Society. Hassam enthusiastically painted the genteel urban atmosphere he discovered in New York, which he greatly preferred to Paris.

He was the leader of the Ten American Painters group who seceded from the Society of American Artists in 1898.

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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