Early career 1880s , c. 1893 In 1882, Hassam became a free-lance illustrator (known as a "black-and-white man" in the trade), and established his first studio. He specialized in illustrating children's stories for magazines such as ''
Harper's Weekly, Scribner's Monthly, and The Century''. By 1883, Hassam had exhibited watercolors in his first solo exhibition at the Williams and Everett Gallery in
Boston. possibly an allusion to his penchant for implying Middle Eastern or Turkish origins. Friends found him to be energetic, robust, outgoing, and unassuming, capable of self-mockery and considerate acts, but he could be argumentative and wickedly witty against those in the art community who opposed him. Hassam was particularly influenced by the circle of
William Morris Hunt, who like the great French landscape painter
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, emphasized the
Barbizon tradition of working directly from nature. He absorbed their credo that "atmosphere and light are the great things to work for in landscape painting." in
Ohio, with "an uncanny resemblance" to
Caillebotte's 1877
Paris Street; Rainy Day In February 1884, after a courtship of several years, Hassam married Kathleen Maude (or Maud) Doane (born 1861), a family friend. However, one Boston critic firmly rejected Hassam's choice of urban subject matter as "very pleasant, but not art." Hassam had moved to France to study
figure drawing and
painting at the prestigious
Académie Julian. He took advantage of the formal drawing classes with
Gustave Boulanger and
Jules Joseph Lefebvre, but quickly moved on to self-study, finding that "[t]he Julian academy is the personification of routine...[academic training] crushes all originality out of growing men. It tends to put them in a rut and it keeps them in it", preferring instead, "my own method in the same degree". His first Parisian works were street scenes, employing a mostly brown palette. He sent these works back to Boston and their sale, combined with that of older watercolors, provided him with sufficient income to sustain his stay abroad. In the autumn of 1887, Hassam painted two versions of
Grand Prix Day, employing a breakthrough change of palette. In this dramatic change of technique, he was laying softer, more diffuse colors to canvas, similar to the French Impressionists, creating scenes full of light, done with freer brush strokes. He was likely inspired by French Impressionist paintings which he viewed in museums and exhibitions, though he did not meet any of the artists. Hassam eventually became one of the group of American Impressionists known as "
The Ten". The completed pictures he sent home also attracted attention. One reviewer commented: "It is refreshing to note that Mr. Hassam, in the midst of so many good, bad, and indifferent art currents, seems to be paddling his own canoe with a good deal of independence and method. When his Boston pictures of three years ago...are compared with the more recent work...it may be seen how he has progressed." As for the French Impressionists, he wrote "Even
Claude Monet,
Sisley,
Pissarro and the school of extreme Impressionists do some things that are charming and that will live." It skillfully uses a distinctive dark palette of blacks and browns (normally considered "forbidden colors" by strict Impressionists) to create a winter urban panorama, which
Le Figaro praised for its "American character". For his
Washington Arch in Spring (1890), he instead demonstrated a bright pastel palette suffused with white similar to what Monet might have employed. The sudden shift expanded his options and his range. Through the 1890s, his technique increasingly evolved toward Impressionism in both oil and watercolor, even as the movement itself was giving way to
Post-Impressionism and
Fauvism. During his European stay, he continued to favor street and horse scenes, avoiding some of the other favorite depictions of the Impressionists, such as opera, cabaret, theater, and boating. He managed to exhibit at all three Salon shows during his Paris stay but won only one bronze medal. Hassam became close friends with fellow American Impressionist artists
J. Alden Weir and
John Henry Twachtman, whom he met through the American Water Color Society, and over the following months he made many connections in the art community through other art societies and social clubs. He contributed works from his European stay to several exhibitions and shows. Hassam enthusiastically painted the genteel urban atmosphere of New York that he encountered within walking distance of his apartment, and avoided the squalor of the lower-class neighborhoods. He proclaimed that "New York is the most beautiful city in the world. There is no boulevard in all Paris that compares to our own Fifth Avenue...the average American still fails to appreciate the beauty of his own country." He captured well-dressed men in bowler hats and top hats, fashionable women and children out and about, and horse-drawn cabs slowly making their way along crowded thoroughfares lined by commercial buildings (which were generally less than six stories high at that time). Hassam's primary focus would forever continue to be "humanity in motion". He never doubted his own artistic development and his subjects, remaining confident in his instinctual choices throughout his life. The urban scene provided its own unique atmosphere and light, which Hassam found "capable of the most astounding effects" and as picturesque as any seaside scene. The challenge for the urban Impressionist, however, was that activity moved very quickly, and therefore, getting down a complete impression in oil was next to impossible. To compensate, Hassam would find a suitable location, make sketches of the components of his planned painting, then return to the studio to construct a total impression that was actually a composite of smaller scenes. in her Garden'', 1892,
Smithsonian Institution During the summers, he would work in a more typical Impressionist location, such as
Appledore Island, the largest of the
Isles of Shoals off
New Hampshire, then famous for its artist colony. Social life on the island revolved around the salon of poet
Celia Thaxter who hosted artists and literary figures. The group was a "jolly, refined, interesting and artistic set of people...like one large family." There Hassam recalled, "I spent some of my pleasantest summers...(and) where I met the best people in the country." Hassam's subjects for his paintings included Thaxter's flower garden, the rocky landscape, and some interior scenes rendered with his most impressionistic brush strokes to date. In Impressionist fashion, he applied his colors "perfectly clear out of the tube" to
unprimed canvas without pre-mixing. Artists displayed their work in Thaxter's salon and were exposed to wealthy buyers staying on the island. Thaxter died in 1894, and in tribute Hassam painted her parlor in
The Room of Flowers. After a trip to
Havana, Cuba, Hassam returned to New York and had his first major one-man auction show at the American Art Galleries in 1896, which featured over 200 works that spanned his entire career to date.
The New York Times observed that of the "steadily increasing band of impressionists, Mr. Hassam is a priest high in the councils." Most critics were convinced that he had taken Impressionism too far, one stating that "his key of color has been rising higher and higher until it simply screeches. His impression has been growing more and more bleary-eyed." Another critic declared, "He ignores the public that dearly loves a picture." Hassam realized less than $50 per picture at the auction. Back in New York in 1897, Hassam took part in the secession of Impressionists from the
Society of American Artists, forming a new society known as
The Ten. The group was energized if not initiated by Hassam, who was among the most radical of members. Their first show at the Durand-Ruel Gallery featured seven of his new European works. Critics dismissed his new work as "experimental" and "quite incomprehensible". Though still interested in including figures in his urban paintings, his new summer works done at Gloucester Harbor, Newport, Old Lyme, and other New England locales show increasing attention to pure landscapes and buildings. His time at the
Old Lyme Art Colony, beginning in 1903, caused a shift of the entire colony's output away from the muted colors of
Tonalism towards
American Impressionism. As his colors became paler and closer in tone to
Monet's, which many viewers found unsettling and unfathomable, he was asked how he came up with a particular palette. He responded that "subjects suggest to me a color scheme and I just paint." Hassam was astute in marketing his work, and was represented by dealers and museums in several cities and abroad. Despite the critics and conservative buyers, he managed to keep selling and painting without having to resort to teaching for financial survival. A colleague described Hassam as an artist "with a keen knowledge of distribution, the tactical ability to place his work." In 1906, he was elected Academician of the
National Academy of Design. After a brief period of depression and drinking as part of an apparent mid-life crisis, the forty-five-year-old Hassam then committed himself to a healthier life style, including swimming. During this time he felt a spiritual and artistic rejuvenation and he painted some Neo-Classical subjects, including nudes in outdoor settings. His urban subjects began to diminish and he confessed that he was tiring of city life, as bustling subways, elevated trains, and motor buses supplanted the graciousness of the horse-drawn scenes which he so enjoyed capturing in earlier times. The architecture of the city changed as well. Stately mansions gave way to skyscrapers, which he admitted had their own artistic appeal: "One must grant of course that if taken individually a skyscraper is not much of a marvel of art as a wildly formed architectural freak. It is when taken in groups with their zig zag outlines towering against the sky and melting tenderly into the distance that the skyscrapers are truly beautiful." Hassam's urban paintings took on a higher perspective and humans shrank in size accordingly, as illustrated in
Lower Manhattan (1907). He began to spend only his winters in New York and traveled the balance of the year, calling himself "the
Marco Polo of the painters." In 1904 and 1908, he traveled to Oregon and was stimulated by new subjects and diverse views, frequently working out-of-doors with friend, lawyer and amateur painter Colonel
C. E. S. Wood. He produced over 100 paintings, pastels, and watercolors of the
High Desert, the rugged coast, the
Cascades, scenes of
Portland, and even nudes in idealized landscapes (a series of bathers comparable to those of
Symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes). As usual, he adapted his style and colors to the subject at hand and the mood of place, but always in the Impressionist vein.
Late career '' With the art market now eagerly accepting his work, by 1909 Hassam was enjoying great success, earning as much as $6,000 per painting. His close friend and fellow artist
J. Alden Weir commented to another artist, "Our mutual friend Hassam has been in the greatest of luck and merited success. He sold his apartment studio and has sold more pictures this winter, I think, than ever before and is really on the crest of the wave. So he goes around with a crisp, cheerful air." The Hassams returned to Europe in 1910 to find Paris much changed: "The town is all torn up like New York. Much building going on. They out American the Americans!" In the midst of the vibrant city, Hassam painted
July Fourteenth, Rue Daunou during the
Bastille Day celebrations, a forerunner of his famous Flag series (see below). Hassam truly did produce thousands of works in nearly every medium during his life. Where his friend Weir might paint six canvases in a season, Hassam would do forty. is owned by the
Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. He also produced some
still-life paintings. Hassam displayed six paintings at the landmark
Armory Show of 1913, where Impressionism was finally viewed as a mainstream and nearly historical style, and displaced by the clamor over the radical revolution of
Cubism, fresh from Europe. He and Weir were the oldest exhibitors, nicknamed at a press dinner as "the mammoth and the mastodon of American Art". Hassam viewed the new art trends from abroad with alarm, stating "this is the age of quacks, and quackery, and New York City is their objective point." He was also displeased that the Armory Show drew attention away from the latest exhibits of The Ten. In 1913, Hassam received a commission to paint a mural at the
Panama-Pacific Exhibition, which was held in 1915, where he was also honored with a separate gallery featuring thirty-eight paintings, although he did not attend the show. Around that same time, he renewed his interest in etching and lithography, producing more than 400 of these works during his later career. While Hassam found these works artistically satisfying, they received a tepid public response, as he commented, "some sell and some of the best do not." ==The Flag series==