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The free handling of paint, overlapping brush strokes, sun-bleached rocks and vibrant hues exemplify the Impressionist style.

Hassam is the most French-inspired American Impressionist in his use of vibrant colors, bright light and broken brushwork.

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Like many American artists of the late 1800s, Childe Hassam studied in Paris, where he was exposed to Impressionist works firsthand. The preeminent American practitioner of the French Impressionist style, he employed European techniques to convey European sensibilities. His work is characterized by brilliant light, vivid color, and brushwork that articulates the forms within the scene, rather than dissolving subject matter into an array of strokes in the manner of the French Impressionists.

After returning to the United States, Hassam spent his summers painting along the Atlantic seaboard. Over the course of two decades, beginning in 1889, he returned to the rocky shores of Appledore, one of nine islands comprising the Isles of Shoals, located off the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine. With its broken brushwork, craggy shore, and broad expanse of sea, Cliff Rock-Appledore exudes a spirit like that of Claude Monet's coastal scenes of the mid-1880s. Hassam displays a confident, free handling, varying his brushwork from the loose treatment of the sun-bleached rocks, to the overlapping strokes and vibrant hues of the foreground water, to the more even texture and tone of the distant horizon. Hassam's emphasis on realism and the solidity of forms is characteristic of the American style of Impressionism.

Before the day of the automobile [Appledore] was a famous summer resort. . . . In those far-off days I painted there . . . many pleasant summers.
-Childe Hassam, 1929

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Frederick Childe Hassam

Cliff Rock-Appledore, 1903

oil on canvas

29 x 36 in.

John Herron Fund

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Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1859, Hassam pursued art as a teenager and worked in a wood-engraving shop making the original drawings from which the engravings were made. His work appeared in Harper’s,  Scribner’s and Century magazines, which provided a level of financial security that he sustained throughout his career. Hassam spent three years in France, where he enrolled in the Académie Julian in Paris and became aware of the French Impressionists. His work is characterized by brilliant light, vivid color, and brushwork that articulates the forms within the scene rather than dissolving subject matter into an array of strokes in the manner of the French. Hassam favored New England coastal scenes, and after returning to the United States, he spent his summers painting along the Atlantic seaboard. Over the course of two decades, beginning in 1889, he returned to the rocky shores of Appledore, one of nine islands comprising the Isles of Shoals, located off the coat of New Hampshire and Maine.

With its broken brushwork, craggy shore, and broad expanse of sea, Cliff Rock–Appledore exudes a spirit like that of Claude Monet’s coastal scenes of the mid-1880s. The painting displays a confident free handling, the brushwork varying from the loose treatment of the sun-bleached rocks, to the overlapping strokes and vibrant hues of the foreground water, to the more even texture and tone of the distant horizon. The Impressionist treatment of this breeze-swept expanse of sea and sun-drenched rocks on the coast of Maine shows the artist’s technical skill in handling pure color. The paint gives the illusion of scintillating light. Hassam’s emphasis on realism and the solidity of forms is characteristic of the American style of Impressionism, and his work is considered the purest example of the American Impressionist movement.

Reference

H. Barbara Weinberg. Childe Hassam, American Impressionist. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0300102932

Warren Adelson, J. Cantor, and William Gerdts. Childe Hassam: Impressionist. New York: Abbeville Press, 1999. ISBN-13: 978-0789205872