Childe Hassam 1859-1935

Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York

Mrs. Lincoln S. Harris (sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, January 28-29, 1970, lot 172, illustrated)

Collection of Arthur G. Altschul, New York (acquired at the above sale)

By bequest to the present owner, Mrs. Arthur G. Altschul (his wife)

Tucson, Arizona, The University of Arizona Museum of Art; Santa Barbara, California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Childe Hassam 1859-1935, February-April 1972, no. 39, illustrated in color p. 31

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie-Mellon University, American Cornucopia: 19th Century Still Lifes and Studies, April-July 1976, no. 58, p. 33, illustrated in color p. 39 

Durham, New Hampshire, University Art Galleries, University of New Hampshire, A Stern and Lovely Scene: A Visual History of the Isles of Shoals, March-April 1978, no. 40, p. 58, illustrated

Seattle, Washington, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington; Los Angeles, California, The Frederick S. Wight Gallery, University of California at Los Angeles; Evanston, Illinois, Terra Museum of American Art; Boston, Massachusetts, The Institute of Contemporary Art, American Impressionism, January-August 1980, p. 131, illustrated in color p. 143

Montclair, New Jersey, Montclair Art Museum; Evanston, Illinois, Terra Museum of American Art; Seattle, Washington, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Down Garden Paths: The Floral Environment in American Art, October 1983-May 1984, p. 67, illustrated p. 49

New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Art Gallery; Denver, Colorado, Denver Art Museum; Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art, Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited, April 1990-January 1991, illustrated in color pl. 25

New York, Adelson Galleries, Childe Hassam: Impressionist, November-December 1999, no. 33

Rockland, Maine, The Farnsworth Art Museum, On Island: A Century of Continuity and Change, June-October 2000, p. 50, illustrated, also illustrated as frontspiece (detail) and on title page

Bicentennial Inventory of American Paintings, no. 61511547, Stanford University Libraries, Palo Alto, California, 1976

Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1978 (reprint of 1894 ed.), illustrated in color

William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism, New York, 1984, illustrated in color p. 103, pl. 108

David Park Curry, Childe Hassam, An Island Garden Revisited, New York, 1990, illustrated in color p. 74, pl. 25

Paula Deitz, "Treasured Island,"  Gardens Illustrated Magazine, June-July 1994, illustrated in color p. 60

Erica E. Hirshler, Dennis Miller Bunker: American Impressionist, Boston, Massachusetts, 1994, no. 63, illustrated p. 98

Warren Adleson, Jay Cantor and William Gerdts, Childe Hassam: Impressionist, New York, 1999, illustrated in color p. 187, pl. 195

Suzette Lane McAvoy, "On Island: A Century of Continuity and Change," American Art Review, vol. XII, September-October 2000, pp. 142-153, illustrated p. 144

During a richly prolific and particularly inspired period between 1890-1894, Childe Hassam focused his attention on Celia Thaxter’s seaside garden.  Thaxter, a poet and longtime friend of Hassam’s, regularly attracted a wide circle of writers, musicians, and artists to her informal salon on Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals, ten miles off the New Hampshire-Maine coast.  After he returned from a three year stay in Paris in 1889, Hassam spent his summers in Appledore, passing many idyllic days with Thaxter at her island cottage.  He had first visited the island as early as 1884 and returned there frequently for what he called “working vacations” until 1916.  Visitors to Appledore Island were captivated by Thaxter’s famous garden, which she cultivated on the challenging and rocky terrain just outside her cottage.  Her contemporary Maude Appleton McDowell wrote: “Her garden . . . was unlike any other garden, although more beautiful, perhaps, than the more conventional gardens I have seen lately; for it was planted all helter-skelter, just bursts of color here and there, - and what color!" (David Park Curry, Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited, Denver, 1990, p. 71).   

A passionate and knowledgeable gardener, Thaxter's book An Island Garden provides detailed horticultural tips, while relating poetic and personal anecdotes about the life of her garden.  Published in 1894, Thaxter's lyrical text was accompanied by a series of Hassam’s most celebrated watercolors, including Home of the Hummingbird.  As William H. Gerdts writes of their collaboration, “It was a crowning achievement for both of them; one critic suggested that they had ‘pressed flowers and caught its perfume between the pages of a book’” (Childe Hassam: Impressionist, New York, 1999, p. 186).   As the title suggests, Home of the Hummingbird commemorates a particular hummingbird, which Thaxter rescued and revived following a night of tumultuous weather:  “After the storm, in the clear, beautiful morning, before sunrise I went as usual into the garden to gather my flowers. . . . a tall Poppy plant lay prone upon the ground, and clinging to the stem of one of its green seed-pods sat my precious pet hummingbird, the dearest of the flock that haunt the garden, the tamest of them all.  His eyes were tightly closed, his tiny claws clasped the stem automatically, he had no feeling, he was rigid with cold. . . . I held him most tenderly in my closed hand, very careful not to crush or even press his tiny perishing body, and breathed into the shut hollow of my palm upon him with a warm and loving breath.

“All day and every day he haunts the garden, and when tired rests contentedly on the small twig of a dry pea-stick near the Larkspurs. . . .Other humming-birds haunt the place, but he belongs there; they go and come, but he keeps to his perch and his Larkspurs faithfully. . . .he alights on my arms and hands and hair unafraid; he rifles the flowers I hold, when I am gathering them, and I sometimes think he is the very most charming thing in the garden”  (Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden, Boston, 1894, pp. 109-112).

Hassam and Thaxter shared a passion for poppies, and the flower featured notably in both her garden and home.   In An Island Garden, Thaxter describes her garden as “steeped in sunshine, a sea of exquisite color swaying in the light air.  Poppies blowing scarlet in the wind, or delicately flushing in softest rose or clearest red, or shining white where the Bride stands tall and fair, like a queen among them all” (p. 102).  Further, Dr. Gerdts observes, “Mrs. Thaxter’s garden was, then, a cultivated garden, one in which poppies figured prominently.  Yet strangely, in many of his Appledore poppy pictures, Hassam rather carefully suggests an uncultivated appearance, with the rich, random blooms in brilliant red appearing as a marvelous blaze of color against the foil of the white cliffs and the blue sea and sky beyond.  Surely his point of view, and the approach that he adopts here were not chosen to negate the creativity of Mrs. Thaxter’s expert gardening, but rather to suggest the wilder freedom of pure nature, the luxuriance of unfettered existence and a reflection of joyous exuberance which characterize so much of the American response to Impressionism” (Down Garden Paths: The Floral Environment in American Art, Montclair, New Jersey, 1983, p. 63).  Hassam's Home of the Hummingbird, with its overlapping strokes in complimentary colors of green and red, highlighted with white and painted over a subtle wash of translucent green, visually immortalizes this sense of freedom and aesthetic beauty that underlies Thaxter's enchanting garden. 

This watercolor has been requested for inclusion in the exhibition Childe Hassam at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 10-September 12, 2004.