ARTNEWS
American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isle of Shoals By Donna Brewer
and The Century. The drawings are delightful, more in the style of Tasha Tudor than his later works. By the age of 28 he listed himself as “an artist” and would go on to paint many hundreds of oils, watercolors, and etchings. He did so as much out of his gift and passion for painting as to support his family. His vocation and his avocation were truly the same. Childe Hassam (pronounced with emphasis on the first syllable) reconfigured his name at the suggestion of the poet Celia Thaxter. She pointed out that, if he wanted to become famous, his middle name was far more memorable than his first.
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To become familiar with this artist is to be transported into the center of Paris or Boston or New York or, as in this exhibition, the Isle of Shoals.
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n my bucket list: to visit the Isle of Shoals, a cluster of small islands off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. Really. On March 19, I will be able to do so at the North Carolina Museum of Art’s exhibition American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isle of Shoals. The announcement of this exhibition, in all likelihood, evoked exclamations of anticipated delight from many and evoked puzzled expressions from others. The average visitor would recognize well-known Impressionists like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, and Vincent VanGogh, and perhaps be able to connect them to their paintings. But how many people can correctly pronounce Childe Hassam’s name, much less identify his work? You may be familiar with an iconic painting, clearly viewed over the shoulder of President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office or more recently, President Obama. The Avenue in the Rain is part of the White House private collection, donated during the Kennedy administration. Painted during World War I, it is one of a series that Hassam painted of American and Allied flags flying over Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. To become familiar with this artist is to be transported into the center of Paris or Boston or New York or, as in this exhibition, the Isle of Shoals. Frederick Childe Hassam was born outside of Boston in 1859. He dropped out of high school and began working as an engraver of wooden blocks. His creative interest, along with a need for income, led him to start illustrating children’s stories in Harper’s, Scribner’s,
Although the artist spent several years painting in Paris and would be praised as America’s finest Impressionist, Hassam viewed himself in less restricted terms. “Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and the brain…going
straight to nature for inspiration and not allowing tradition to dictate to your brush.” Nature was certainly a driving force behind the artist’s inspiration at the Isle of Shoals, the focus of this exhibit. Beginning as early as 1886, the artist and his wife made regular summer trips to the resort hotel on Appledore Island, the seasonal home of Celia Thaxter. The setting provided haven for Hassam and other New England artists and writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and fellow artist William Morris Hunt. Childe Hassam found a close friend in Celia Thaxter, who hosted an artistic salon at her cottage. Many of his paintings depict her celebrated garden, an explosion of color out of the rocky island soil. As one views “Moonlight” in the exhibition, Thaxter’s words of shared appreciation for the island are reflected in her poem of the same name: Be silent and behold where hand in hand, Great Nature and great Art together stand! Just as Hassam might have explored the island in order to find the ideal site for a painting, the visitor is invited to walk “around the island” viewing the scenes depicted by the artist in the sequence they would naturally occur. Members of the Museum’s team made numerous fieldtrips to Appledore. John Coffey, co-curator for this exhibition, explained that “the primary goal of the field work was to locate and document the artist’s painting sites. This allowed us to compare the actual site with Hassam’s interpretation to determine how much or how little the artist manipulated the scene for his artistic ends.” >>
BOOM! MAGAZINE | MARCH 2016 7