Childe Hassam famous American painter (1859-1935)
was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA as Frederick Childe Hassam. Known as a “black-and-white man” in the free-lance illustrator trade in 1882 when he had established his first studio, Childe Hassam went on to create over 3,000 paintings in his lifetime. He belonged to “The Ten” an influential group of American artists of the early 20th century. In 1883, his friend Celia Laighton Thaxter, a poet and writer of Appledore Islands (see Island Garden Joy… posted April 17, 2012) convinced him to drop his first name and thereafter he was known simply as “Childe Hassam”. At that time he began to add a crescent symbol in front of his signature. Why or what it meant is not known.
Childe Hassam was not only a great painter in his time he also loved New York and is said to have proclaimed: ” New York is the most beautiful city in the world. There is no boulevard in all Paris that compares to our own Fifth Avenue.” His love for New York’s Fift Avenue is shown in a series of his paintings. Two of the highlights in Childe Hassam’s carreer came in 1906, when he was elected Academician of the National Academy of Design and in 1909 when he earned US $6,000 per painting. A huge sum to be paid for a painting in the early 1900’s and I assume even nowadays. Throughout the 1920’s the artist received the Gold Medal of Honor for lifetime achievement from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and numerous other awards.
However, until a revival of interest in American Impressionism in the 1960’s this remarkable American artist was considered one of the “abandoned geniuses”. Let’s hope Childe Hassam’s paintings will continue to receive a well deserved interest in his home country and beyond. I have good hope they will since at least one of Childe Hassam’s paintings is on display in the Oval of the White House and the painting of Celia Laighton Thaxter in her garden in Appledore, 1892, is in hands of the Smithsonian Institute, while the 1890 painting of Celia’s Garden can be seen in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
More about Childe Hassam’s life on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Hassam
Enjoy some of Childe Hassam’s wonderful paintings accompanied by
music from Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the flowers…
