Arts and Letters

Childe Hassam, a salient figure in American painting, was in nothing more significant than in his individualism. He had the American way of profiting by European example without falling a victim to European convention. This statement is borne out by the facts of his career. Born in Boston, in 1859, he grew up at a time when the young artist inevitably went abroad to complete his training. When, after some study at the Boston Art School, he proceeded to Paris in 1883, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to fall under the influence of Boulanger and Lefebvre. All young Americans launching themselves in that period, turned as a matter of course to such academic teachers. It did them, and it did Hassam, unmeasured good. The discipline they received directed their talents into habits of sound drawing and composition. There is an early figure piece of Hassam's, called "Autumn," a full length of a shambling old harpist, which shows with what thoroughness he had mastered the rules of technique then governing the Salon—in which, by the way, his work was exhibited in 1888. But even thus early it was apparent that he was feeling his way toward a path of his own and when at a later date he awoke to the evangel of Claude Monet and the principles of modern impressionism he gave to a foreign tradition a new and peculiarly personal accent.

He was able to do this in part because he had been drilled in the ways of good craftsmanship but even more because there surged within him a passion for the beauty existent in his native land. "New York," he once said, "is the most wonderful and most beautiful city in the world. All life is in it." All life was, for him, in the whole American scene when he returned from Paris, all life to be expressed in terms of light and air and color. "Gusto" is the word for Hassam, a kind of joyous energy which vitalizes everything he did, the pictures of the New England coast, studies of flower-lit spaces or of grassy rock-strewn shores, war time paintings of flag-bedecked New York, interiors done in the studio or elsewhere, or, in his later years, pictures of figures and the sea developed at Easthampton, where he died in 1935. He let his fancy range when he came to these last designs and gave them romantic titles—“Sunset from the Grove of Nemesis," "The Wild Swans Sacred to Apollo," "Diana the Huntress Finding Graffiti of Poseidon," and such like. But it was not really the enchantment of pagan myth that lured him. It was, rather, the enchantment of sheer nature, of a nude figure gleaming through a thicket or seen against sea and sky, of trees and clouds, of life as it ministers to the pleasure of the eye. He was prodigiously industrious, forever exulting at work, and he poured forth an endless quantity of paintings, water colors, and etchings, as was made apparent when an exhibition of his work was held at the Academy in 1927. But in this great mass there is never perceptible a slackening of his ardor, there is never a sign of any cooling of his warm, emotional response to truth and beauty.

If one quality more than any other promises to keep his art alive it is that springing from his force as a colorist, working always with taste, with restraint, with a finely tempered brilliance. His is color heightened by light, strained through atmosphere. It is, finally, the color of a painter who had originality and style.

Childe Hassam was elected to the Academy in 1920 and was a faithful participant in its deliberations down to the time of his death. His interest in the organization did not cease then. By the terms of his will all the oils, water colors, and pastels remaining in his studio were bequeathed to the Academy, the proceeds of the sale of them to be held in perpetuity as the Hassam Fund. The income from this fund is by his instructions to be devoted to the encouragement and promotion of painting and etching in the United States and Canada, through the purchase of American and Canadian works of art. These works, he also stated, might be presented to any museum in either country. The gift was characteristic of his large and generous nature. His fellow-Academicians mourn in Childe Hassam not only a distinguished colleague but a singularly loyal friend and lovable man.