1859-1935

Frederick Childe Hassam is one of the most renowned American Impressionists. Trained as a wood engraver, he began his career in the early 1880s, specializing in watercolor and book illustration in the environs of Boston. His career would culminate, some decades later, with a series of brilliant oil canvases featuring the beaches and farmlands of East Hampton, where Hassam regularly summered from about 1919 to 1935.

 An extended sojourn in France in the second half of the 1880s afforded him the opportunity to study at the Académie Julian, under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre; here he cultivated the light-infused palette and the broken brushwork of the French Impressionists. In New York in the 1890s, Hassam concentrated on urban, suburban, and coastal subjects, dividing his time annually between the city and various New England resorts and art colonies, among them Cos Cob, in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire. In 1920 he purchased the house called "Willow Bend" in East Hampton, where he resided until his death in 1935.