Childe Hassam. Frederick Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes.
Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.
Hassam was known to all as Childe, a name taken from an uncle. Hassam was born in the family home on Olney Street on Meeting House Hill in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, on October 17, 1859.
His father, Frederick Fitch Hassam, was a moderately successful cutlery businessman with a large collection of art and antiques. He descended from a long line of New Englanders.
His mother, Rosa Delia Hawthorne, a native of Maine, shared an ancestor with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. His father claimed descent from a seventeenth-century English immigrant whose name, Horsham, had been corrupted over time to Hassam. With his dark complexion and heavily lidded eyes, many took Childe Hassam to be of Middle Eastern descent, speculation which he enjoyed stoking. In the mid-1880s, he took to painting an Islamic-appearing crescent moon next to his signature, and he adopted the nickname Muley, invoking Muley Abul Hassan, a fifteenth-century ruler of Granada whos
Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.
Hassam was known to all as Childe, a name taken from an uncle. Hassam was born in the family home on Olney Street on Meeting House Hill in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, on October 17, 1859.
His father, Frederick Fitch Hassam, was a moderately successful cutlery businessman with a large collection of art and antiques. He descended from a long line of New Englanders.
His mother, Rosa Delia Hawthorne, a native of Maine, shared an ancestor with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. His father claimed descent from a seventeenth-century English immigrant whose name, Horsham, had been corrupted over time to Hassam. With his dark complexion and heavily lidded eyes, many took Childe Hassam to be of Middle Eastern descent, speculation which he enjoyed stoking. In the mid-1880s, he took to painting an Islamic-appearing crescent moon next to his signature, and he adopted the nickname Muley, invoking Muley Abul Hassan, a fifteenth-century ruler of Granada whos
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