Frederick "Childe" Hassam, Early Pioneer of "American Impressionism"

Most people are aware of the French Impressionist Movement. What is lesser known is that it also came to America. In 1898 a group of American Impressionist known as “The Ten” was founded. The the founding members included Frank W. Benson, Joseph Rodefer DeCamp, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Childe Hassam, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, Edmund C. Tarbell, John Henry Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir. Today we are learning about Childe Hassam.

Frederic “Childe” Hassam (October 17, 1859- August 27, 1935) was born and grew up in the Boston area. After high school, Childe studied wood engraving and worked as an engraver making letterheads and newspapers. He also painted, mostly with watercolor, but in 1879 he began creating oil paintings as well.

Childe lived in the Boston area until 1886, during this time he painted many outdoor scenes of the Boston area including Rainy Day in Boston (1885) and A City Fairyland (1886).
After Boston, he and his wife Kathleen Maude Doane, who married in 1884, moved to Paris in 1886. While living in Paris he studied at the Académie Julian but then quickly quit, finding it too restrictive. He continued teaching himself, picking up on the emerging style of the French Impressionists. Which would later have him as a founding member of “The Ten”. While living abroad he painted scenes of  France Grand Prix Day (1887), Bastille Day, and Boulevard Rochechouart, Paris (1889).

In 1889, Childe moved back to the United States, but this time he lived in New York, but would summer in Gloucester Harbor, Newport, Old Lyme, and other New England smaller towns. This annual change of scenery allowed him to paint not only city scapes such as Washington Arch in the Spring (1890), Union Square in the Spring (1896), and Lower Manhattan (1907)  but also bucolic landscapes such as Celia Thaxters Garden, Isle of Shoals Maine (1890) and Church at Old Lyme (1905).
Later in his life he began to tire of the city life and the modernization of New York and Paris. He began to spend only his winters in New York and traveled the rest of the year, calling himself "the Marco Polo of the painters.”

In 1916 he supported the WW1 war effort by making about 30 paintings called the “flag series” including Avenue in the Rain (1917) which now hangs in the White House.
Over the course of his life Childe Hassam would paint over 3,000 paintings. He also had the rare honor of being a popular artist in his day fetching up to $6,000 a painting during his lifetime. Today his original pieces sell for over $2,000,000.

View our framed reproductions of a curated collection of his masterpieces.