Making an impression

By Greg Cook

Staff writer

Making an impression

"He went out and looked for places that had a really distinctive New England-American flavor," said Susan Larkin of Connecticut, an independent art historian specializing in American Impressionism. She contributed one of the catalogue essays for the retrospective exhibit "Childe Hassam, American Impressionist," which is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through Sept. 12.

Hassam, one of America`s greatest Impressionist painters, was likely attracted to Gloucester by its bustling commercial harbor. He once said, "The man who will go down to posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him."

"If modern art means the formless atrocities which are turned out by incompetents and sold under the guise of art by designing foreign dealers, then I have no use for it," Hassam said in a 1934 interview that Weinberg quotes in her essay in the July issue of The Magazine Antiques. As others embraced these new forms, his work was criticized for being too pretty, decorative, dashed off and only superficially felt.

Art and marketing

Hassam established his artistic reputation in Boston painting romantic, realistic scenes like "Rainy Day, Boston" of 1885, which depicts people and black horse-drawn carriages traveling down the sweeping intersection of three streets. It recalls the French painter Gustave Caillebott`s "Paris Street, Rainy Day" of 1877.

An American icon

Among Hassam`s most famous paintings is his euphoric series from 1916 to `19 showing New York`s Fifth Avenue decorated with banners and the flags of America and its First World War allies. Larkin said Hassam`s paintings of New England churches -- the Independent Christian Church, Unitarian Universalist, in Gloucester in 1918 -- were inspired by a similar patriotic fervor.

"It was the church as an American icon," Larkin said.

Hassam`s 1918 painting of the church is in the Met`s collection and is included in the New York show. The Cape Ann Historical Museum owns an etching of the same scene.

Hassam first traveled to Gloucester to paint in the summer of 1880 or `81. He returned in 1890, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1899, 1900, 1909, 1916, 1918, and 1919.

Hanging in the 20th century gallery at the Cape Ann Historical Museum is Hassam`s 1919 painting "Church at East Gloucester." Looking down from an East Gloucester hill, the gold tower of the Methodist Episcopal Church shoots up from the blues and greens of the houses packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the harbor.

The Rockport Art Association`s permanent collection includes Hassam`s Sept. 10, 1919, watercolor "Old Granite Pier, Rockport," which depicts mammoth blue piles of granite lined up along the railway tracks leading to the Rockport docks and barges waiting to ship the stone to buyers.

"It`s showing Granite Pier at its peak," said art association Executive Director Carol Linsky. "For us, it`s the essence of Rockport, and what we`re trying to do with our own museum collection is maintain a pictorial history of Rockport and Cape Ann. It represents a place in time that`s not going to be back again."