Childe Hassam
Childe Hassam grew up just outside of Boston as the son of a hardware merchant. After apprenticing to a wood engraver, he found work as an illustrator for Boston periodicals. Hassam took art classes at night and traveled to Paris in 1886 to study at the Académie Julian, where he encountered the latest developments in Impressionism, the style he would practice after his return to America in 1889. By the turn of the century, he was one of the leading impressionist painters in the United States.
What does this artist emphasize in this painting?
Despite its small size and isolation, Maine’s Appledore Island played a large role in Hassam’s life, shaping the course of his career and artistic development. The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne described Appledore, “it seems as if some of the materials of the world remained superfluous, after the Creator had finished, and were carelessly thrown down here, where the millionth part of them emerge from the sea, and in the course of thousands of years, have got partially bestrewn with a little soil.”
Museum purchase, gift of the Charles E. Merrill Trust with matching funds from the M. H. de Young Museum Society
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