10/17/2026
to artist Childe Hassam (1859-1935)! Hassam, a Dorchester native, was one of the first Impressionists to paint in Gloucester, and he did so for over twenty-nine years—first in the early 1880s with his colleague and friend Ross Sterling Turner (1847–1915). Hassam went to Europe to study in the summer of 1883, and returned to Boston where he opened a studio. His first major oil paintings, Boston scenes, were executed then. In 1886, he attended the Académie Julian in Paris, stayed three years and then settled in New York City in 1889.
Hassam was one of the two oldest artists to participate in New York City’s 1913 Armory Show, a groundbreaking exhibition that introduced European Modernism to America. Hassam showed six Impressionist pieces, but Impressionism was, by this point, a mainstream, even historical, style. Ironically, Hassam disdained the new European movements, among them Cubism and Futurism, and commented about the arts, “...this is the age of quacks, and quackery, and New York City is their objective point.”
Hassam made prints as well as paintings in Gloucester. Both his etchings and his lithographs are clean and precise, showing mastery and confidence with these unforgiving mediums. Childe Hassam and other artists around the turn of the 20th century cemented Cape Ann’s reputation as a significant place for aesthetic inquiry. Hassam’s portrayals of Gloucester became so popular that artist Ernest Haskell wrote:
“Before I had seen Hassam’s pictures, [Gloucester] seemed like a fishy little city, now as I pass through it I feel Hassam. The schooners beating in and out, the wharves, the sea, the sky, these belong to Hassam.”
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Childe Hassam (1859-1935), “Isle of Shoals, Duck Island," 1906. Watercolor on paper.
Collection of the Cape Ann Museum.. Gift of Dr. Horace Wood Brock in honor of his sister Hope Brock Winthrop, 2021 [2021.65].
