Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1859, and became the most prominent American Impressionist of his generation. After training as an illustrator in Boston, he spent three formative years in Paris in the late 1880s, where he absorbed the broken brushwork and light-filled palette of French Impressionism. Unlike many American painters who simply imitated French models, Hassam rooted his Impressionism in distinctly American subjects: the bustling streets of New York, the rocky coasts of New England, and the summer light of the Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast.\n\nHassam was extraordinarily prolific, producing over three thousand paintings, watercolors, pastels, and prints across a career of more than five decades. He was a founding member of The Ten, a group of American Impressionists who broke away from the Society of American Artists to exhibit independently. His celebrated Flag series, painted during World War I, depicting Fifth Avenue draped in patriotic banners, represents one of the most recognizable bodies of work in American art. A confident self-promoter as well as a masterful technician, Hassam played a central role in establishing Impressionism as the dominant mode of American painting at the turn of the twentieth century.