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Van Gogh • Artist Biographies • Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam
Birth Year :	1859
Death Year :	1935
Country :	US

Childe Hassam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He studied at the Boston Art School, was apprenticed to an engraver

Boston Common at Twilight, 1885-86 Childe Hassam Buy From Art.com

from whom he learned the techniques of engraving, and thus began his career as an illustrator. He went to Paris, in 1883, and studied with two academic artists, Louis Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. His fellow student, during this period, was the American John Henry Twatchman who had previously studied in Munich. These years in Paris, occurring as they did when Impressionism had reached its peak of influence, were important to Hassam. When he returned to America, he began to paint in the Impressionistic style and, in 1898, he joined with Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and seven other American artists to form a group called "The Ten". Their purpose was not merely to exhibit jointly but also, by so doing, to revolt against the stifling force of accepted academic styles-in a certain sense, they wanted to do for American art and taste, what European artists were accomplishing abroad.

The Americans had a more difficult task, for the history of art in America was still quite brief and the American tradition was principally one of imitating conventional, accepted, "safe" artists. Hassam was a resident of New York City and his favorite subjects were aspects of New York life, which he presented with a light, sparkling palette, endowing streets and buildings with the light and color inherent in Impressionism. He also painted some rural New York and New England landscapes with the same light touch. His work was so pleasant that it was readily accepted and Hassam received many prizes and awards as well as being elected to the National Academy in 1906. In 1915, at the age of fifty-six, he turned to the technique he had learned as a very young man and began to work as a graphic artist. Before his death he had completed over 350 plates, both etchings and lithographs. In these, using only black and white, he sought to achieve the effects of sunlight, as he did in the oil paintings upon which he also continued to work.

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