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Who knows precisely what caused the sea change. Perhaps it was the burning of Appledore Island (and with it the home of Childe Hassam’s dearly departed friend and muse, Celia Thaxter). Then again, it could have been the dynamic rush and bloom of John Singer Sargent and John Marin’s alpine watercolors (shown, respectively, at Knoedler Gallery in 1909 and Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in 1911—both shows Hassam attended). Or maybe it was the exuberant color and chaos of the Bastille Day celebrations during what would be Hassam’s final trip to Paris in 1910-11. Whatever it was, Childe Hassam’s watercolors after 1912 marked a new period in his oeuvre—a little bolder, a little stranger, a little more open and alive. Hassam’s first one-man exhibition was actually a watercolor show at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston in 1883. There’s a real delicacy and propriety to his early work in the medium: his tonal gradations are mellow, paint is layered sparingly, and splashes of light and shadow (those steadfast hallmarks of impressionism) are understated and exact. Even the more experimental moments are polite under Hassam’s brush. A spray of blossoms on a tree feels like the outburst of a sneeze quickly excused. A flash of sunlight bleeding off a trail into the grass ends just as soon as it began. But as the decades wore on, Hassam’s reserve loosened into a rawer fluidity. The best-known examples of this shift can be found in the Appledore Island series, watercolors Hassam created between 1912 and 1916 that frame the New Hampshire shoreline’s dramatic, rocky outcroppings with the eye of a 20th-century photographer and the spontaneous brushstrokes of someone fighting time’s stranglehold on change. In 1922, Albert E. Gallatin (who would go on to found the Gallery of Living Art in New York City) assembled who he believed were the top ten watercolorists working in the modern United States for a book on the subject. Alongside Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, and Charles Demuth, Gallatin named Hassam, specifically citing his work from the nineteen-tens for its “freedom and gusto.” It’s a similar energy that Hassam brings to “Sunset, Little Hill.” Painted in the same period as the Appledore watercolors, “Sunset”’s landscape suggests not the wind-torn cliffs of coastal New England but the sweeping blue hills of the Hudson River Valley, where Hassam spent the summer of 1916. Anyone familiar with a Hudson River sunset can tell you the moment Hassam chases here—the final dip as the sun’s light disappears behind the peaks of the Shawangunks, or perhaps the Catskills, and the sublime orange-pink hue that suddenly illuminates the underbelly of every cloud in sight. In “Sunset, Little Hill,” Hassam tears across the sky with scribbled flourishes. In some areas, the blue-grey of the clouds and warm citrus of the sun run parallel to one another, as if someone had pulled the light right off of the cloud and allowed it to run free. But nothing here stays separate long: those same colors are soon flowing into one another, reminding of time’s sneaking and subtle passage. Layers and layers and layers of wash—built up like years, like centuries—become the mountain. The trees at its center are aflame (autumn’s brilliant leaves, or some impossible reflection of summer light?) And from the opposite shore of the river we stand and wait for the lights to flicker out just as suddenly as they came on, colors seeped from the skies and carried away by the water’s swift current, blue and all its echoes overtaking a landscape we have just barely come to know. To inquire about this work, head here.
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