Childe Hassam
(American, - )
The influential Impressionist painter Frederick Childe Hassam was born in Boston in . As a child, he attended the oldest public elementary school in the country, The Mather School, where his inherent artistic talent was first apparent. After leaving high school before graduating, he worked as an engraver and a draftsman during the late s. In the early s, Hassam worked as a freelance illustrator; his work appeared in multiple publications, including Harper’s Weekly. He took drawing and painting classes, but by that time his preference for watercolor had overtaken other media. It was through his studies at the Boston Art Club that Hassam traveled to Europe—first for two months in the summer of —to study and produce art, a trip that would prove formative.
Just three years after his initial trip to Europe, Hassam returned to settle in an apartment in Paris’s ninth arrondissement; he would eventually occupy the former studio of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, though the two never met. Hassam enrolled in formal drawing classes at the Académie Julian, studying briefly under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger before withdrawing from the school to pursue his own path of self-guided study. Well-known for his street scenes depicting everyday life in cities like Boston, Paris, and New York, Hassam also withdrew regularly from these urban environments, spending his summers in the idyllic retreat of Appledore Island off the coast of Maine. His keen observations of these environments and his masterful rendering of them cemented his place in Impressionist history; he continued a prodigious output of paintings, watercolors, and drawings until his death in .
