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
