A project already nearly fifty years in the making, the Hassam catalogue raisonné, spearheaded by the president and director of Hirschl and Adler Galleries, is, we feel, sure to reset scholarly opinion of the American impressionist. As a taste of what’s to come, we present here one of the exhaustively researched entries.
What takes nearly half a century and encompasses more than two thousand works of art? The preparation of a truly comprehensive catalogue raisonné of one of America’s favorite artists, impressionist Childe Hassam. The project’s origins can be traced back to 1976 when American art scholar Stuart P. Feld, a partner at Hirschl and Adler Galleries since 1967, realized two things: that the gallery held a vast trove of material related to Hassam and that he, Stuart, could set a standard for American art scholarship, then in its infancy, by creating a complete catalogue of the artist’s work.
What he discovered in the gallery files was information about Hassam assembled in conjunction with the organization of the first Hassam retrospective since his death in 1935, which was held at Hirschl and Adler in 1964, and information accumulated in the process of handling the sale of a great many works by Hassam in the years since the founding of the gallery in 1952.
What he didn’t understand at the outset was just how prolific Hassam was. By 1978 he realized that the occasional help from a few members of the research team at Hirschl and Adler was not enough. He hired Kathleen Burnside, a recent graduate of the esteemed art history program at Williams College, to assist. Her work became so indispensable that she soon morphed into a trusted colleague and co-author.
Not only have they together catalogued nearly twenty-four hundred works by Hassam—oil paintings, watercolors, pastels and other drawings, as well as hundreds of illustrations—they have also found a number of formerly unlocated works and reunited them with early information about them. They have discovered original titles of pictures that had long been dissociated from them and have uncovered changes that were made to works, both by the artist himself and by others (sometimes several times) as the pieces passed through the marketplace in the ninety years since Hassam’s death. Along the way, they also identified many hundreds of fakes, largely older pictures that have had “Hassam” signatures added.
Every entry in this magnum opus—projected to fill several fully illustrated volumes and live in perpetuity as an ongoing digital database maintained by an American museum—also includes a complete bibliography, exhibition record, and history of ownership for the work. Each is accompanied by a comprehensive essay examining all aspects of the work.
To give readers and scholars an idea of what this looks like, what follows is the entry (with minor adaptations to ANTIQUES’ style) for The Sea, first exhibited in 1898 and a work considered by Hassam as one of his best of that time. Our space does not permit the inclusion of the meticulously detailed bibliographical, exhibition, and provenance records for the canvas, but even without them, it is pretty clear that a new standard for American art scholarship is in the wings.
–Eds
The Sea
Alternate title: Portrait 1896–1898; reworked c. 1914 Oil on canvas, 80 x 56 in. (203.2 x 142.2 cm) Signed (at lower right): “Childe Hassam 1892” Private collection, Ohio
On September 7, 1898, Hassam wrote to his friend, John W. Beatty, who was director of the Department of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, about one of his two submissions to the Third Annual Exhibition at the Carnegie that was to open on November 3 and run until January 1, 1899. With respect to a work titled “The Sea,” he wrote: “I may change the title of the first picture on the list. It is a figure picture but I want an impersonal title. . . . This is practically my summers work . . . having been started two years back and just completed.”
This letter ostensibly establishes the start date of the picture as 1896, which is important in light of its subsequent history.
Hassam obviously had high hopes for The Sea in terms of a medal and a cash award, and, in more than a hint of his aspirations, he added: “I have not put in my list of honors received, but if you would like to have it I will send it along to you.”
The Sea was a towering vertical canvas that was in-stalled in an elaborate, gilded, Italian Renaissance–style tabernacle frame that Susan G. Larkin suggests, in her essay, “How Hassam Framed Hassams,” in the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum’s 2004 Hassam exhibition, was probably designed by the noted American Beaux-Arts architect, Stanford White (1853–1906). Larkin writes:
American architect and interior designer Stanford White collected antique frames, which he used as inspiration for new designs that combined classical and Renaissance elements. White often employed the form known as the tabernacle frame, composed of an entablature supported by pilasters or columns, which had been devised in the late Middle Ages for devotional images. He probably designed the impressive tabernacle frame visible on Hassam’s oil The Sea, 1898 . . . [seen] in an installation photograph of the Third Carnegie International Exhibition. By enshrining his portrayal of a young woman relaxing on a veranda in a molding associated with depictions of saints, Hassam implied that his secular American altarpiece demanded the same reverent attention due to sacred art.
By the time the Carnegie show opened on November 3, Hassam must have been ecstatic, as The Sea had been awarded a silver medal of the “Second Class” and a cash prize of $1,000. But the artist’s euphoria must have been short-lived, as on that very day a critic for the Pittsburgh Daily Post penned an unflattering review of the painting, addressing both its scale and technique:
Childe Hassam has a large painting called “The Sea.” It is painted in the way that is so stylish nowadays. It is full of the feeling of outdoors; full of light; full of sunshine–and it is utterly inane. This gallery is larger than most rooms, but one cannot get far enough away to see the picture well. It is painted in the style called “broad.” The sea might look like water if you get clear over in the remotest corner and then almost close your eyes. Of course, you will look funnier that way, but the picture will not look quite so funny. It is like the portrait of the family of the Vicar of Wakefield–very nice indeed, but no place to put it.
A few days later, the Pittsburgh Press of November 6 printed a yet more devastating notice, expressing, even at this late date, a continuing uneasiness with Hassam’s impressionistic style. After faulting the color sense of a mural by Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), the writer turned to The Sea:
The second prize picture is also mauve and green, but more so, with the addition of some yellow and blue. It is by Childe Hassam, and is called “The Sea.” A girl made of patches of the colors named sits in a chair with some vague trees and hydrangeas beside her, and something shapeless before, all made of undisguised chunks of paint of the same solid colors, devoid of texture, atmosphere, “feeling,” or principle. There is, to the ordinary observer, neither truth, beauty nor ideality in a mass of exaggerated color. Why the artist received second prize for this picture I have no idea. “Perhaps,” suggested an artistic acquaintance, meekly, “it was his turn.”
As if that were not enough, the writer proceeded to add devastating comments about Hassam’s second submission, a work titled Night Piece to Julia, which is more familiarly known as July Night.
In a more matter-of-fact way, on November 6, the Chicago Tribune simply published a large reproduction of the painting and announced the prize it had been awarded at the “Carnegie International Competition.”
Away from Pittsburgh, the press gave The Sea a more favorable, but tempered, response. In the November 12 issue of Harper’s Weekly, the critic Charles H. Caffin wrote:
The human quality is hardly so apparent in the silver-medal picture of Childe Hassam, entitled “The Sea.” This is rather an example mainly, if not quite entirely, of technique, of the exceeding skill with which warm light and shadows are depicted and a brilliant intricacy of beautiful color is obtained. It is unquestionably lovely and masterful, but it does not make a particularly personal appeal to the observer. Mr. Hassam works in the method of Monet, laying on his color unmixed in separate brushstrokes, which at the requisite distance do their own blending. But in its vigor and almost brusque decision his style is distinctly his own. This picture cannot fail to raise the painter in the estimation of his fellows and the public.
The mixed reviews notwithstanding, Hassam reveled in his receipt of another medal, and on November 12th, he penned a letter to Beatty: “It is with pleasure that I received your letter informing me that I have been honored with one of the Carnegie Prizes. It is perhaps too late to thank the jury, but if you will make my compliments to Mr. Caldwell its chairman you will oblige me greatly.”
And, once again, on December 12, Hassam wrote to Beatty, encouraging him to acquire The Sea for the Carnegie: “Of course I should like to sell my picture to the Museum as it is the most important canvas I have done and is a Museum picture I think. I should also like to sell it at my catalogue price, as I think it is worth it.”
But as favorable as the Harper’s review was, Hassam was displeased with the accompanying quarter-page illustration of his painting. In a December letter to a Mrs. Hall, presumably at Harper’s, he called “the reproduction . . . a libel, on the painting the photographer or rather bungler . . . not using an autochromatic plate.” And on December 26, he aired a lengthy complaint to Beatty on the same subject:
Will you kindly give me the particulars in regard to the reproduction of my picture “The Sea” in the present exhibition of the Carnegie Galleries? I gave no permission to Harper and Bros to reproduce it and they did not write asking me if they might. The photographer did not use an autochromatic plate, with the result that . . . the reproduction is nothing at all like the painting. . . . I gave no right to anybody to reproduce my painting, much less to any bungler that expects to take a negative on an ordinary plate. Can you also send me the exact sight size of the picture. Harper and Bros to [ok] the unwarranted liberty of cutting the plate to fit their page. These reproductions are a libel on my beautiful painting and I want to stop any more being made except with my authorization.
The December 1898 issue of The Art Amateur carried a more sympathetic notice of the painting, calling it:
a more serious effort than much of his recent work. It represents a young woman seated in front of the vine-covered porch of a country-house between two plants of hydrangea in flower, and looking out to a brilliant bit of summer sea. The color is at once high in key and delicate, and the relations of sunlight to shadow are a close approach to those of nature.
Interestingly, the illustration that accompanied the article showed the painting substantially cropped at the top, perhaps to improve on a composition that might have been perceived as too vacant in its upper reaches.
When The Sea moved on to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, for its Sixty-eighth Annual Exhibition in January 1899, Hassam’s ten pictures in the show were collectively awarded the Second Temple Prize. The Philadelphia Inquirer of February 19, 1899, reported:
Childe Hassam, to whom the second prize was given, is a New York artist, and possibly the most rampant impressionist we have in this country. Mr. Hassam is showing at the Academy ten pictures, a collection which would seem to indicate that that artist can obtain some very remarkable results in his chosen method of expression. His pictures are not always successful, but in the main he puts into them a deal of that atmospheric scintillation for which the followers of his cult strive. They are warm, sunny and, very beautiful as to their color qualities.
After Philadelphia, The Sea was Hassam’s only entry to the 74th Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design, in New York, which opened on April 3, 1899. Immediately, the Brooklyn Standard Union on April 1 published a relatively matter-of-fact notice on the picture: “Childe Hassam has a large and extremely clever study of a woman sitting in the shadow of an arbor, by the seaside, looking toward the breezy sea, with sunlight playing over her light dress and fair hair.”
In a general way, it was the size of the work that seems to have been the focus of many of the critics who covered the show. On April 2, the New York Sun reported that “the three chief spots” on the walls of the South Gallery were devoted “to three of the most truly notable canvases in the exhibition, for there need be no hesitation in designating as such the contributions of Miss. Cecilia Beaux, Mr. Horatio Walker and Mr. Childe Hassam.”
Turning specifically to Hassam, the writer continued:
Mr. Hassam’s “The Sea” is a large and ambitious work. It is perhaps the least successful of the three just named, though in saying so we mean merely as a realization of the artist’s own aspirations, for comparison in any other way between pictures so totally unlike would be absurd. Its decorative purpose when viewed at the right distance is perfectly apparent, but the subject seems to have been carried out on too large a scale, or, rather, the workmanship is insufficient for such a large canvas. It is true that the attention is arrested at once by the brilliancy of the performance, yet a certain irresistible impression of emptiness is produced by certain passages; the picture would be more comprehensible if the canvas were half the size. Nevertheless it is one of the most striking in the exhibition.
Viewing the same exhibition, the Brooklyn Times Union of April 4 was unrelenting:
It was possibly to avoid the accusation of unrelenting conservatism or narrowness that the Hanging Committee gives Childe Hassam’s “The Sea” (No.177), the centre of the west end in the south gallery, certainly a conspicuous place, and one supposed to carry with it more or less honor. The picture itself is one of the boldest freaks of impressionism Mr. Hassam has yet produced, and it is hardly possible to fancy to what limits he will carry his fad if his productions receive such consideration as the Academy has given “The Sea.”
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle on April 9 mimicked previous sentiment:
There are pictures in the main gallery that would have been cast out with merry gibes if they had been offered some years ago, but that are soberly accepted to-day for whatever of good there is in them. Childe Hassam’s big canvas, “The Sea,” for example, is a type of the French impression. It is painted with a loose brush, uncertain in its smaller movements, and contains an effect of light and air that are secured by the use of colors locally impossible. Yet it is a picture of breadth and purpose, and as such has been accepted apparently without a riot, for it occupies one of the show places in the room.
On April 22, Brooklyn’s Standard Union took an opportunity to discuss the “old order” and “the new in art” with specific respect to Hassam’s sole work:
The merit and beauty of an exhibition is largely in the eye of the beholder. The varying comments awakened by the two leading exhibitions now open in Manhattan, would seem to indicate this. Regarding the Academy show, a Manhattan journal, noted for the value of its critical opinions, has pronounced it the best one held there in years. Another states that it is a most discouraging exhibition and varying shades of opinion have filled in the gaps between these two extremes. It receives more diverse comments probably, for the reason that it contains many di- verse elements. The old order and the new in art meet here, sometimes with striking results. Some years ago, the big and impressionistic canvas by Childe Hassam, would not have been admitted to the Academy galleries. This and some others of similar character, in juxtaposition [sic] with the more conservative pictures of the older men and Academy members, sometimes make it difficult to value the exhibition as a whole.
The Sea fared better when it went west. J. H. Gest, director of the Cincinnati Museum—incidentally, the first museum to purchase a work by Hassam—wrote to the artist the day after their 6th Annual Exhibition of American Art closed, perhaps gearing his remarks to the recent press: “You must not imagine that your large canvas ‘The Sea’ has not been appreciated. Its impression on the public here—those who understood and those who did not,—both,—has been marked since the opening of the exhibition. We shall be sorry when the time comes for sending it to St. Louis.”
Apparently, Hassam once again hoped to sell the painting in Cincinnati, but Gest continued: “Its purchase was out of the question our fund being so small.”
When Hassam’s The Sea went on view at the Art Institute of Chicago a few months later, on November 5 The Inter Ocean of that city observed that “rarely has so important a canvas of his crossed the Alleghenies.”
After its extensive exposure in 1899, The Sea likely came to rest in the artist’s studio until 1904, when it was one of nine pictures selected for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, where Hassam did well, garnering a gold medal for his oils, and another for his pastels.
The purpose of these many exhibitions was both to enhance the reputations of the participating artists but also, and perhaps even more importantly, to enhance sales. Clearly, Hassam had thought The Sea was one of his finest productions, but he nevertheless must have taken to heart the sentiments expressed by various critics, and at some point after the 1904 exhibition in St. Louis and before the painting took to the road again in 1915, he made some dramatic changes to the painting.
In 1915 the painting made an unconventional return visit to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for its 110th Annual Exhibition, where its transformation was accompanied by a new name, Portrait, still in keeping with the artist’s desire for “an impersonal title.”
Exactly what changes Hassam made in the painting were first demonstrated in an illustration in the catalogue of the Tenth Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists at the City Art Museum of St. Louis in 1915. Approximately 15 to 20 inches of sky and trees were removed from the top of the picture, making the canvas nearly square, thus cropping even more of the painting than was shown in a photograph that had appeared in The Art Amateur in December 1898. Additionally, a group of hydrangeas at the lower left was removed, leafy branches were added to the upper left corner, and those above the woman’s head were opened up to provide a comfortable setting for the figure. Strong vertical supports suggestive of a porch or gazebo were removed and several tree trunks were added as were several pieces of an orange fruit. The figure also underwent a metamorphosis, the more painterly dress of the earlier state now becoming tighter and more linear. The earlier neckless figure was given a neck within a vertical collar and the head, now more linear and controlled, was raised from a downward glance to one looking straight out to sea. Like the rest of the dress, the white cloak was tamed, and whereas it formerly covered most of the upper back splats of the chair, the revised version exposes the bottom and middle back splats, with the one at the top now only partially covered. A right hand of the figure has been added, holding an orange poppy. All in all, likely addressing earlier critiques, the entire picture became more tightly rendered, the profile of the face now more fully articulated and the hair more tightly arranged.
With these changes, Hassam must have regarded the painting as a new work, and in 1915 he sent it out to exhibitions in Philadelphia, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, and Chicago, and back to Philadelphia in the following year. It was well received in Buffalo, where a writer for the Buffalo Commercial on May 26 applauded it: “The center of a wall in Gallery XIII is given to ‘The Sea,’ by Childe Hassam, a magnificently painted picure of the sea and coast. The figure of a graceful woman occupied the immediate foreground, adding a distinct charm to the scene, which is one of great and entire beauty.”
1898; November 12, 1898; and December 12, 1898. Archives of American Art, Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art records, 1883–1962, Correspondence, 1883–1962.
On its return to St. Louis, Emily Grant Hutchings at-tempted to place Hassam’s picture in an art historical context, in an article in the Saint Louis Globe-Democrat of January 20 that addresses the artist’s technique:
We may look to Childe Hassam, that thorough-going American, who did much to break our early academic fetters. We need only the memory of his early, luminous canvases, with their simple technique and their vibrant atmosphere, to mark a long stride in some direction—whether forward or away from the ideal in painting, we are not yet prepared to say. He has one composition, No. 72, called, “The Sea,” in which the brush strokes do not actually wig
The Sea seems to have made its last public appearance in Hassam’s lifetime in a return visit to the Carnegie in an exhibition titled Paintings Which Have Received Prize Awards in International Exhibitions at the Carnegie Institute, which opened on February 5, 1935, just six months before the artist’s death on August 27. On February 5, 1935, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the exhibition, still not able to unconditionally applaud what the artist had described as one of his finest works:
Step into gallery one, and you’re back in the cool dark days from 1897 to 1903, when men painted as if the blinds were down and it wasn’t very noisy outside. And soothing it is to see so many unheated browns and grays and whites together on a canvas, so that the occasional purple renegade like the Childe Hassam impressionist “The Sea” (second prize, 1898) or the sun-drenched Frank W. Benson “The Sisters” (second prize, 1899) stand out with vivid abruptness.
The Sea remained Hassam’s property until his death, at which time it was bequeathed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Sea/Portrait is signed and dated 1892, although, curiously, a photograph taken in conjunction with the 1898 Carnegie exhibition shows neither a signature nor a date. By Hassam’s own testimony in his letter to John W. Beatty on September 7, 1898, he had started it “two years back.” The painting was thus likely begun in 1896, before his extended later 1896–1897 trip abroad, and completed after his return late in 1897.
