Childe Hassam: American Impressionism - 590+ Impressionist Paintings

Category: Kindle Store,Kindle eBooks,Arts & Photography

Childe Hassam: American Impressionism - 590+ Impressionist Paintings Details

CHILDE HASSAM: AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM Art Book contains 590+ HD Reproductions of Impressionist landscapes, seascapes, nocturnes, nudes, winter and genre scenes with annotations and biography. Book includes Table of Contents, Top 50 Museums of the World and is formatted for Kindle HDX, HD, Kindle for iOS and Android tablets (use rotate and/or zoom feature on landscape/horizontal images for optimal viewing).It was an April afternoon in 1918, as fighting raged far away on the western front, that the vigilant New York City policemen noticed the vigorous middle-aged man. Peering out into the Hudson River, he was intensely sketching a camouflaged transport vessel. This was more than suspicious enough for the cop, who promptly arrested the supposed spy. The sketcher, however, was not engaged in espionage, but art. It was typical of Childe Hassam that upon his prompt release, he paused to praise the policeman for his alert thoroughness.Certainly no one could accuse Hassam of having any less than the same attentiveness to his work. By the time of this wartime incident, the 59-year-old Hassam was renowned as one of America’s greatest artists, but it did not slow either his extraordinary productivity or excellence. Nor had his fame and years dimmed his Impressionist commitment to painting his own time and place in the plein air. He remained what Baudelaire described as a “passionate spectator” for whom “it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude.”But as with all great creators, Hassam frustrates the categorizer. His honest commitment to paint what he saw left us with the breath-taking record of a Gilded Age urban America that matched Hassam’s own irrepressible exuberance and vitality. At the same time, his love of place and rootedness guided a commitment to intimately depicting traditional scenes of his native New England; from rocky shores to ports to country churches. Legitimately regarded as the pre-eminent Impressionist this side of the Atlantic, Hassam also resisted any slavish commitment to a school. While he was always contemporary, Hassam was not a modernist. His independence of thought and individuality of expression separated him from the merely derivative Francophile or the fashion-chaser.Growing up in the soon to be absorbed Boston suburb of Dorchester, Hassam’s early artistic proclivity secured him an apprenticeship with a wood-engraver. Soon this led to a draftsman’s position and then by 1882, only in his early twenties, Hassam was a free-lance illustrator with his own studio. In the same year his energetic creativity led to a first solo exhibition in Boston, at which fifty new watercolours were displayed. From this point on, Hassam supported himself through selling his own work and early success in doing so allowed him to marry his beau—Kathleen Maude Doan—in 1884 and move to a new studio in the heart of Boston. (cont.)