Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Childe Hassam
American; 19th-century, 20th-century
Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery
66%
Old House and Garden, East Hampton, Long Island. c1898. Oil on canvas
Here Hassam has hardly bent his subject — this country house and gardens — to fit the form of his brushy, vibrant, somewhat abstracting picture. Rather, it's like the "impressionistic" style hovers atop the scene but seldom if ever seeps inside of it, as though this is a photograph that's been put through some Frenchifying filter: look at how little the streaky sky blends with the roof of the house, or at the way the floral whites and oranges sit heavy atop their shingled background. This is all to say, of course, that Hassam was a mannerist who aped the generation of Parisians that preceded him — but might there be something more than mere repetition in this picture? It's possible that Hassam's tendency to focus not on relations, but on things, paired with his boggling commitment to practicing a style of painting (Impressionism) that was categorically relational, is what led to pleasant little paradoxes like, for instance, the almost linear distinctness of his foliage despite how much it looks like it wants to blend into a single substance, or the inexplicable heft of that purple house. Hassam is bad as an Impressionist, but maybe he's good as something else. (TFS, 2026)