It’s starting to get warm out so the seaside’s on my mind! In the latest episode we visit Appledore on the Isles of Shoals with American painter Childe Hassam. This group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine was a long-time vacation fave for this Boston artist.
We’ll find out how he fused the color and energy of artists like Claude Monet and Camille Pissaro with uniquely American settings like this stunning rocky New England shoreline. And the ruckus he and some of his fellow painters started to create a brand-new kind of American art!
If you want to follow along, you can find it here on the museum’s site.
SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)
“A Long Look” themes are “Easy” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and “At the Cafe with You” by Onion All Stars https://pixabay.com/users/onion_all_stars-33331904/
Episode Music
“Berceuse, Op. 16” by Gabriel Fauré
https://musopen.org/music/composer/gabriel-faure
“String Quartet no. 12 in F major ‘American’, Op. 96 – I” composed by Anotnin Dvorak
https://musopen.org/music/4887-string-quartet-no-12-in-f-major-american-op-96
“Summertime” by Lesfm
https://pixabay.com/music/acoustic-group-summertime-166175
“Massenet Toccata” by Jules Massenet
https://musopen.org/music/10569-toccata
Artwork information
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/south-ledges-appledore-10086
Childe Hassam info
“Childe Hassam:American impressionist” by Ulrich W. Hiesinger
https://archive.org/details/childehassamamer0000hies
https://www.theartstory.org/artist/hassam-childe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Hassam
The Ten info
“Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters” by Ulrich W. Hiesinger
https://archive.org/details/impressionismina0000hies
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson
Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you thru the experience of what I see and discover while looking at art for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the history, mystery, or controversy behind it!
Ready? Then let’s head to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC
MUSIC
Today I’m looking at The South Ledges, Appledore by Childe Hassam [HASS-am]. If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com forward slash rockyshore, all one word. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around!
So what do you first notice?
A slender young woman sits among craggy white boulders tinged with blue that are piled high above a sparkling blue-green sea. She sits close to us near the bottom center of the canvas with her back facing us. Her head turns slightly to our right so we can just see her cheek and a hint of brown hair.
She wears a long white dress belted with a pale pink sash and white gloves. Her right hand reaches up to delicately touch the wide brim of her ivory-colored hat decorated with a navy blue band.
The scene’s flooded with bright sunlight from the upper right, it looks like midday. We’re standing a little above and behind her, looking down on those chalk white boulders that spread across the lower half of the canvas which is about 3 feet square.
They’re flecked with powder blue, pink and mauve strokes that all smear into each other. Scribbles of teal, terracotta orange, grey and periwinkle blue scatter across the rough surface.
A mass of darker rocks below and beyond them jut out into the water from the right side like stubby fingers with white surf foaming around them. They’re a busy mix of browns and greys, ocher, pine and emerald green, and brick red, with shadowy areas of navy blue, chocolate brown, and dark purple.
That gorgeous water flickers with rich tones of sapphire, navy blue, green and flicks of white. There’s even some quick dabs of purple near the shoreline. The water reaches up and back toward a narrow band of smokey pale blue sky at the very top. A white smudge near the upper right kind of looks like the sails of a distant ship.
Hassam built this scene with tightly-packed short horizontal strokes of color. Some of them are so thick, they stick up off the canvas and catch the light. It’s one reason the painting has this shimmering quality. They make the rocks and water look fractured or fragmented with the colors all side by side. It kind of reminds me of a tapestry or mosaic.
So where is this stunning coastline and who’s the girl?
MUSIC
This brilliant scene was painted at Appledore, one of the Isles of Shoals, a group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. Hassam loved spending his summers here and these rocky ledges were a popular tourist spot.
Appledore was kind of an artists colony for musicians, writers, artists, and poets. It was so popular that one of his friends who lived there, Celia Thaxter, described the yearly mob of visitors as “a chaos of humanity.” Celia was a renowned poet herself and her home became the center for a yearly artist salon. Hassam visited her every summer and she became a big fan of his work. Because of her reputation, her support really helped him get on the art radar.
What’s funny about this and the many other paintings he did on Appledore is how he literally turned his back on the crowds and focused on just this wild coastline and expansive water. It was kind of wishful thinking. Right? Don’t we all wish we could have a beautiful place to ourselves, sometimes?
MUSIC
Childe Hassam was a pioneer of American Impressionism. He was born in Dorchester, a part of Boston, MA in 1859 and grew up there. He didn’t really have formal art training, he learned by being mentored by older artists in Boston as well as taking classes once in a while. But he became good enough to get a job as an illustrator for a printer then went on to illustrate children’s stories for popular magazines like Harper’s Weekly.
He did two trips to study in Europe, the second after marrying Kathleen Maude Doane in 1884 when he was about 25 years old.
The second trip–to Paris–had a huge impact on him because he saw the startling, colorful, energetic paintings by French artists like Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro for the first time.
He’d learned about painting outdoors while still in Boston and did that to create scenes of the city. He understood how light, color and weather could create atmosphere and mood. And that showing regular people just going about their day or enjoying themselves outdoors was just as legitimate as painting–yet again–some overly smooth and perfect scene from an ancient myth.
But what he picked up from these artists in Paris was the idea that bright color, fast, broken brushwork and a focus on capturing a very specific moment of time in a real place created a living, breathing art. It created an impression…
So he started using these techniques to lighten and energize his own work. Fun fact, his studio had belonged to Renior at one point and he found some of his oil sketches! Although Hassam said, “I did not know anything about Renoir or care anything about Renoir. I looked at these experiments in pure color and saw it was what I was trying to do myself.”
MUSIC
Childe and Maude returned to the US in 1889 and settled in New York City.
He set up a studio in lower Manhattan at 5th Ave and 17th St. near Union Square and loved painting the lively, bustling street scenes out his window. He kept illustrating books but he also became incredible versatile, learning printmaking and how to work in watercolors and pastels, all to increase his market.
He joined the Society of American Artists which was an influential group. But over time he and a few other members got fed up with how the Society was changing. Leadership seemed more interested in appealing to wealthy collectors with traditional tastes vs encouraging members to experiment and innovate. One of them described it as “too much bigness, too little art.”
So they formed an exhibition group called Ten American Painters aka The Ten. They deliberately kept it small so they could have tighter, more focused shows where the public could really see the immense creativity American artists were capable of.
They liked the new way of seeing the French Impressionists had introduced but wanted to differentiate themselves by depicting places that were uniquely American, like its cities and countryside and the New England coast. There was also a very definite patriotic streak to some of their subjects.
I talked about the Gilded Age in the episode about Cecilia Beaux and Hassam was another artist who benefited from working during this time. There were a lot of wealthy Americans eager to fill their mansions with fine art. And as they got used to Impressionism, Hassam and this group gave them American artists they could collect instead of European Old Masters.
Hassam was never a fan of the abstract and really experimental art that came out during his later years by guys like Picasso. Nonetheless, when he died, he donated his very large and valuable body of work to the National Academy of Arts and Letters, stipulating they should be sold to finance the Hassam Fund to help museums purchase contemporary works by North American artists.
I never did find who the young woman was. Maybe it was Maude or one of the bright young things drawn to Celia Thaxter’s salon and stunning coastline on this long ago summer day.
OUTRO:
I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.
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