Childe Hassam 1859-1935

Estate of the artist
American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York
ACA American Heritage Gallery, New York (sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, May 21, 1970, lot 61, illustrated in color)
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute of Fine Arts, n.d.
Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Boston, Massachusetts, Musuem of Fine Arts; Manchester, New Hampshire, The Currier Gallery of Art; New York, The Gallery of Modern Art, Childe Hassam: A Retrospective Exhibition, April-December 1965, no. 57.
New York, Hammer Galleries, Childe Hassam, February 1969, no. 16, illustrated (as Under the Elms)

Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, Childe Hassam, New York, 1922, illustrated
Adeline Adams, Childe Hassam, New York, 1938, p. 122, illustrated

Childe Hassam was an enthusiastic traveler who spent his summers visiting friends and painting at the various eastern art colonies which existed in such resort locales as Appledore Island, Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, Provincetown and Gloucester, Massachusetts. Donelson F. Hoopes writes, "If, in fact, Hassam had been searching for the ideal landscape, as his travels of thirty summers suggest, he found it at last on the eastern end of Long Island…. The long, empty white beaches that stretched east and west into the shimmering hazy light have neither the elemental starkness of Appledore, nor the gentleness of Old Lyme, but, as at those places, the quality of light at East Hampton is modified by its proximity to the ocean. Hassam found this quality essential to his art, and he created some of his most chromatically brilliant work during his East Hampton years. The size of his pictures became correspondingly large, as if to embrace the whole of nature, and he began to employ a broader, freer brush stroke. There is an exuberance about these Long Island landscape that speaks of a youthful spirit, in spite of the fact that the artist was approaching his seventieth year" (Childe Hassam, New York, 1979, p. 19).

Hassam was invited to East Hampton for the first time in 1898 by Gaines Ruger Donoho, a friend and fellow artist, and over the next two decades, Hassam visited eastern Long Island quite regularly. In 1919, Donoho’s widow sold an eighteenth-century shingled cottage adjacent to her home to Hassam and his wife Maude and they moved into Willow Bend at 45 Egypt Lane in May of the following year.  Hassam spent six months of every year in East Hampton for the remainder of his life.  Judith Wolf writes, "Hassam loved East Hampton with its wide, tree-lined village street. ‘It has a character all its own, may it never be changed! And Egypt Lane--please register my protest against any "cleaning up" of its tangle of evening primroses and blackberry.’ He was especially fond of Egypt Lane and Skimhampton Road because he felt they were ‘about the only old lanes left unchanged.…’ For Hassam, East Hampton was a charming ‘old American community' where one could still sense a simpler, earlier way of life" (Childe Hassam 1859-1935, East Hampton, New York, Guild Hall Museum, 1981, p. 13-16).  East Hampton Elms in May, an expansive, light-filled composition of arching elm trees forming a sun dappled canopy over a quiet country road recreating the charming character of Long Island which Hassam so enjoyed.