Childe Hassam

Hassam's surname was a corruption of Horsham, an English ancestor's name that had shifted through several generations of American pronunciation. He dropped his first name, Frederick, in favour of Childe, an uncle's surname, because it sounded less ordinary. With his dark complexion and the exotic name, people assumed he was Middle Eastern. He did not correct them. He was the most prolific of the American Impressionists and the most commercially successful, though he identified with the label only reluctantly. He painted impressions of what he saw, he said, and that was realism, not a movement. In Paris he took over Renoir's former studio and found some oil sketches left behind by what the landlord called the mad painter. Hassam had never heard of Renoir. He looked at the sketches and recognised that this was what he had been trying to do himself. He returned to America and became the leading figure among The Ten, a group of American Impressionists who exhibited together from 1898 to 1918. His street scenes of Boston, New York and the New England coast translated French light into American geography: brownstone stoops, cobblestone streets wet with rain, the particular quality of winter sunlight on Beacon Hill. The flag paintings are what most people know. During the First World War he painted a series of flag-draped Fifth Avenue scenes: patriotic, luminous, and technically brilliant. The flags become fields of colour dissolving into the architecture, closer to abstraction than reportage. Before a Boston auction in 1887 he sent small oil paintings to favoured critics, along with notes suggesting positive reviews. It worked.