Impressions of the City

The Ashcan School of Robert Henri and his circle often get credit for being the first artists to take the American urban scene as a subject for fine art in a modern style. But decades before they went in that direction, Childe Hassam, one of the most influential early American Impressionist painters, painted his impressions of the American city in the new style. Born October 17, 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, Hassam painted many scenes of his hometown such as Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston (above, from 1885). Using the effect of a gray, rainy day to the fullest, Hassam captures the look and feel of Victorian Era New England with the horse-driven carriages on cobblestone streets and the high-necked collars of women’s dresses as they hurry their children home and out of the rain. Just as the French Impressionists came to grips with the urban landscape and the idea of progress, Hassam painted the world he knew best—not the rural setting so often identified with Impressionism but the urban setting of his childhood and early career.

In Boston Common at Twilight (above, from 1885-1886), Hassam again shows mothers with their children walking in the city. Instead of rain, Hassam chooses to bathe the figures in warm twilight. Silhouetted darkly against the white snow blanketing the ground, the pedestrians seem as bare and simple as the trees that extend into the distance. A little girl feeds birds in Boston Common, one of the few oases of nature in the larger urban jungle that Boston was becoming as it neared the turn of the century. Like Paris after the makeover by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, American cities such as Boston faced the new tension of maintaining green spaces as an antidote to the contagion of sprawling progress. The little girl feeding the desperate birds struggling to survive in the cold winter landscape may symbolize the efforts of artists such as Hassam and other lovers of nature to keep these brief interludes of green alive in the face of the brick and mortar invasion.

Hassam’s Manhattan's Misty Sunset (above, from 1911) seems like a painted valentine to the city on a par with Woody Allen’s cinematic tribute Manhattan. The Ashcan artists sometimes approach this level of beauty in their depictions of the city, but their greater devotion to the reality of the everyday existence of the city dweller usually trumps any “purity” of beauty. When people appear in Hassam’s works, they usually don’t play a very big part. It seems as if they’re just film extras passing through. In this way Hassam’s work looks much like that of Edward Hopper, except that the beauty of Hopper’s works is more of a terrible beauty full of loneliness and isolation. Looking at Hassam’s Manhattan’s Misty Sunset, you don’t see the people but you can feel them there, sharing in the beauty of the moment from the windows of their dwellings—a community. In that sense, Hassam is eminently Victorian in his belief in shared community values, whereas Hopper is eminently modern in his disillusioned view of such values. The city in Hassam’s eyes seems pure nostalgia to us now, but it was very, very real to him at the time.

Etched into History

Edward Hopper, 1882-1967. Night Shadows. 1921/1924. Etching. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. © The Huntington

Even after Edward Hopper achieved some status as a painter, he continued to keep a press for etchings in his studio. Each day he’d enter his studio and toss his fedora hat onto the rarely used machine. In countless photographs and interview footage of Hopper, that machine usually lurks in the background. Hopper never could bring himself to part with that press, like an old trusted friend. When he wanted to give a special gift to someone, he’d crank up the old press and run off a copy of Night Shadows (above), demonstrating the pride he felt in the etchings he once turned to as a way to make money when his paintings weren’t selling. The exhibition Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950 at The Huntington and the accompanying catalogue by Jessica Todd Smith and Kevin M. Murphy help explain Hopper’s fondness for the print genre and how the prints of that era reflected the people and history of America for nearly half a century. “We have selected prints that seem to capture the spirit of a certain cultural frisson that took place in art and culture of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century,” Smith writes in the catalogue. The prints selected from the Huntington’s massive collection of American prints demonstrate the same incisive eye and mastery of economy that the artists themselves displayed.

Samuel Margolies, 1898-1974. Man’s Canyons. 1936. Etching and aquatint. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. © The Huntington

At the dawn of the new century, the city rose like a natural wonder, flooding the imagination of artists and inspiring them to create works such as Samuel Margolies’ Man’s Canyons (above). Towering skyscrapers carried to the heavens the hopes and dreams of all society, offering the promise of endless possibility where the sky was, literally, the limit. Advances in publishing technology created a shift in the illustration world, leaving behind the need for literal journalism and moving forward to a world asking for images “deeply imbued with political and social engagement,” as Smith writes. The 1913 Armory Show brought the innovations of European modern art to America, further challenging artists to develop a new vision of their changing American environment. Margolies’ skyscrapers, rising vertically as the rays of light slash diagonally across the picture, owe as much to modern architecture as they do to Cubism.

Martin Lewis, 1881-1962. Glow in the City. 1929. Drypoint. Purchased with funds from Hannah and Russel Kully. © The Huntington

But not all hopes rose with the skyscrapers. Martin Lewis, who taught his friend Hopper etching techniques, captures the dichotomy of the modern city in Glow in the City (above), a romantic rendering of a woman wistfully gazing across the rooftops and washing lines at the tall building far in the distance. Hopper and Lewis both delved into the mood of the city lingering beneath the bustling excitement and the inexplicable sense of loneliness in the midst of teeming crowds. The artists of the Ashcan school, especially the former newspaper illustrators drawn to New York City for money and inspiration—such as John Sloan and George Bellows–also cast their eye upon the darker side of the city.

Charles Turzak 1899-1986. Man with Drill. ca. 1935. Woodcut. Collection of Hannah S. Kully. Printed with the permission of Joan Turzak Van Hees, daughter of Charles Turzak, Charles Turzak Studio/Gallery, Orlando Florida. © The Huntington

Charles Turzak’s Man with Drill (above) explicitly illustrates the dehumanization through labor of the time, when man and machine seemed troublingly one. Such images recall the German Expressionists and their fear of the machine and, by extension, the woodcut graphic novels of Franz Masereel. Where Masereel strung together long series of woodcuts into silent graphic novels of social commentary, single images such as Turzak’s ring just as powerfully as statements of social unrest. The visible vibrations rippling from the figure with the drill send shockwaves that threaten to topple the buildings in the background. In the face of the Great Depression and two world wars, such images strove to topple the powerful and help regain a sense of balance for the masses.

Childe Hassam, 1859-1935. The White Kimono. 1915. Etching. Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. © The Huntington

In response to the ills of the dehumanizing city, many artists turned to small town America and more intimate scenes for an antidote. Regionalists such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton depicted farms and farming in a return to simpler, more natural living. Illustrators followed the Dust Bowl migration to California as those displaced victims searched for an American Eden. The American Impressionist Childe Hassam, in contrast, sought solace in personalized parlor scenes such as The White Kimono (above), a quietly beautiful testimony to the excellence of the American print at the same time it documented and probed the American psyche.

Smith and Murphy provide an excellent, if brief overview of the American print from the turn of the twentieth century up until the dawn of the day of television. They list all the major donations, including forthcoming gifts of works by John Sloan from Gary, Brenda, and Harrison Ruttenberg and the American print collection of Hannah S. Kully, that have made the Huntington’s collection so comprehensive today. The actor and comedian Steve Martin provided funds to make the exhibition possible. Martin collects American art and provided the narration to the video that accompanied the Hopper exhibition at the National Gallery of Art last year. (My review of that video here.) Martin’s involvement in this project exemplifies the mainstream appeal such an exhibit should have for the public at large. These prints hold up a mirror to America over the course of five decades in a way that even great photography can only approximate. Here is the American dream seen through the prism of the American artist’s imagination and rendered in clear black and white. When you look at images such as Pele deLappe’s Rumors of War, Washington, D.C., showing the anxious faces of people listening to a radio and anticipating war in 1939, you see the same anxiety on the faces of Americans today coming to terms with new rumors of war. Pressed in Time provides not just a lesson in history or art but a lesson in the history of the American soul.


[Many thanks to The Huntington for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950 and for the images from the exhibition.]

Art Allies

Born on this date in 1859, Childe Hassam painted some of the finest Impressionist paintings ever done by an American artist. As much as he loved Paris and the countryside of the French Impressionists, Hassam loved even more his native country, especially the streets of New York City, his home for most of his life. During World War I, Hassam painted many scenes of the patriotic fervor surrounding the push for America to enter the war and the patriotic frenzy that broke out when it finally entered the fray. Allies Day, May 1917 (above) shows the flags of the United States of America, France, and England hanging from the buildings lining the day’s parade route. Without showing the throngs of people gathered, Hassam captures the spirit of the time in the bold colors of the flags, which drape rhythmically off into space. Throughout his career, Hassam himself forged alliances with other artists that helped further his own career as well as the school of Impressionism in America.

Hassam discontinued using his given first name, Frederick, in favor of his unique middle name Childe (pronounced “child”) to add to his artistic mystique. A high-school dropout, Hassam learned wood engraving before moving on to illustration and watercolor. While in London, he admired the watercolors of J.M.W. Turner. In Paris, he studied with Salon academics but felt drawn more to the outlaw style of the Impressionists exhibiting throughout the city. Hassam succeeds most when he brings that Impressionist style to bear on uniquely American scenes, such as Winter in Union Square (above, from 1889). He gilds “the Gilded Age” with the soft brushstrokes and atmospheric effects of Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir while still capturing the distinctly American architecture, free of the old styles of the big cities of Europe. The emergence of photography during this period allows us to see what the New York of this time looked like, but Hassam’s seasonal paintings of the city allow us to feel what it was like to live back then.

When the American art establishment, embodied by the Society of American Artists, resisted Impressionism in America, Hassam resigned and helped form the group known as The Ten with his friends and fellow Impressionists J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman. Like Weir and Twachtman, Hassam also painted the rural scenery of New England, as in his Oyster Sloop, Cos Cob (above, from 1902). Again, Hassam paints a classic boating scene found often in French Impressionism but injects a new note with the distinctly New England feel. Sadly, Hassam and the American Impressionists faded from the limelight as America’s wartime alliances fostered an international interchange that introduced new modern art movements that pushed them to the margins of art history. Not until the 1960s did Hassam and the Impressionists find a new audience, hungry to find early examples of America’s entry into the world of European art.

Sweet Harmony

Of all the American Impressionists that I love, John Henry Twachtman, born August 4, 1853, may be my favorite. Twachtman brings a beautifully delicate style to his Impressionism combined with a true sense of spirituality. His Winter Harmony (above) shows how masterfully he could create an entire world of whites and bring a winter scene to life in all it’s harmonious glory. He seems to have earned a reputation as being difficult during his lifetime, but I prefer to see that difficult streak as more demanding—of himself and of others pursuing a career in art.


Despite his capacity for curmudgeonry, Twachtman established many close friendships with fellow artists. J. Alden Weir and Childe Hassam, two other great American Impressionists, remained close to Twachtman up to his early death at the age of 49 from a brain aneurysm. Weir introduced the young Duncan Phillips to the art of Twachtman after Twachtman’s death. Phillips began adding Twachtman’s work to what would become the Phillips Collection obsessively, regretting that he never got to meet the man himself. Works such as The White Bridge (above) show Twachtman’s ability not only to capture the American landscape in all its delicacy and wonder but also to infuse it with the spirituality he himself felt deeply. Twachtman’s commitment to his artistic ideals led him to help form the separatist group “The Ten” after he felt that the establishment Society of American Artists had turned too conservative.

The Twachtman painting that haunts me the most is his Sailing in the Mist (above). When I saw this painting at a PAFA retrospective of Twachtman’s work years ago, it etched itself on my imagination. After the death of one of his children, Twachtman searched for a way of expressing his grief and arrived at the image of a small boat drifting off into the mist. I’ve always seen Twachtman in a different light since encountering that painting, and believe that it might be the best imaginative voyage into “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” ever done by an American. Sadly, Twachtman himself took that final voyage much too early, leaving us only a glimpse of what he could have produced.

An American Vision

Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), Spring Night, Harlem River, 1913; Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 25 1/8 x 30 1/8 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1920

Holding up the works of American Impressionists to the best France had to offer, Duncan Phillips, founder of The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC once said, “Monet was only an eye, whereas Twachtman, Weir, and Lawson are also temperaments.” The singular vision of Duncan Phillips once focused tightly on American Impressionists, which made up 87 of the 237 paintings displayed when The Phillips’ doors opened in 1921. The exhibit American Impressionism: Paintings from The Phillips Collection tries to recapture that moment in art history when American Impressionism stood high in American art circles and Duncan Phillips was at the center of that ascendancy.

In the companion catalogue to the exhibit, American Impressionists: Painters of Light and the Modern Landscape, Susan Behrends Frank, Assistant Curator at The Phillips Collection, pays tribute to and chronicles the journey of Duncan Phillips as he struggled to become an art critic and then amassed his renowned collection. William H. Gedts, perhaps the foremost authority on American Impressionism, provides additional context to Frank’s essay with his own essay exploring the larger reception of Impressionism in America. At the heart of both essays lies the story of the struggles Phillips and the American Impressionists had first to overcome resistance to Impressionism and then to decide what “American” Impressionism truly meant. From the very beginning, Phillips boldly hung works such as Ernest Lawson’s Spring Night, Harlem River (above) next to works by Claude Monet, the quintessential Impressionist for most Americans at the time, intentionally inviting comparisons with a faith that the Americans could hold their own and that America deserved a place next to Europe in the world of art.

Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919), Afternoon by the Pond, Ca. 1908-1909; Oil on canvas, 25 1/8 x 30 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1921

After seeing the collections of the Corcoran Gallery and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, Phillips forged “an intensely self-conscious focus on the evolution of his collection in comparison… in the late teens,” Frank explains. Augustus Vincent Tack, a student of John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and William Merritt Chase, became an early mentor to Phillips as he developed his critical eye and fostered contacts within American Impressionist circles. Late, Weir himself befriended Phillips and challenged him to hang the works of Americans beside those of the great European Impressionists. Through Weir’s influence, Frank explains, Phillips sought “American artists who, he believed, expressed spiritual truth as well as visual truth” in the vein of early visionaries such as George Inness, in contrast to “the theatrical vision” of the Hudson River School. Weir himself fit this bill nicely, as can be seen in his Afternoon by the Pond (above), an intimate scene of nature full of the silent, contemplative spirituality Phillips came to favor.

John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), Summer, Late 1890s; Oil on canvas, 30 x 53 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1919

Another spiritual American Impressionist Phillips learned to love through Weir was Twachtman, whom Phillips always regretted never meeting himself. Works such as
Summer (above) inspired Phillips to say that in Twachtman “impressionism [had been] carried to the heights of spiritual expression.” “Few, if any, landscape painters were more sensitive or subtle,” Phillips wrote of Twachtman. Phillips passionately collected all the Twachtman paintings he could in the years before the opening of The Phillips Collection.

Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Washington Arch, Spring, Ca. 1893; Oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 22 ½ in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1921

Sadly, Phillips relationship with Childe Hassam, the American Impressionist he ranked only behind Twachtman and Weir in greatness, was more stormy. Phillips continued to collect Hassam’s work, but never with the same enthusiasm as he brought to Twachtman and Weir’s art. In the late 1920s, Hassam and Phillips argued over the direction Phillips’ collection was taking, with Hassam denigrating Phillips' taste in art as “opinionated ignorance.” However, Phillips continued to value works such as Hassam’s Washington Arch, Spring (above), one of the highlights of The Phillips Collection and of all American Impressionism.

Allen Tucker (1866-1939), The Rise, Undated; Oil on canvas, 30 ½ x 36 in.; The Phillips Collection, acquired 1927

With the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression in the United States, The Phillips Collection fell on hard times and the market for American Impressionism slumped. At the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, where the works of Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse first exploded on the American art scene, the conservative aspects of Impressionism made the movement seem a thing of the past. Phillips himself began to collect more modernist works. In retrospect, he realized that his collection of American Impressionists helped pave the way for these modern movements. Works such as The Rise (above) by Allen Tucker, once called “The American Van Gogh,” signaled a new period for Impressionism in America.

Today, American Impressionism has achieved a rebirth among art critics. After little interest during the 1940s and 1950s, several collections of solely American Impressionism rose in the 1960s. The long-overdue recognition of the achievement of Twachtman, Weir, and Hassam, as well as that of other American Impressionists such as Maurice Prendergast, Theodore Robinson, Edmund Tarbell, and many others, owes much to Duncan Phillips and his museum. The exhibit American Impressionism: Paintings from The Phillips Collection recaptures a landmark moment in American art and allows us to live it once again.

[Many thanks to The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue and the images from the exhibit.]