The California series by Childe Hassam is a series of approximately 28 works based on American Impressionist Childe Hassam's visits to Northern California at least three times, in 1904, 1908, and 1914, and Southern California at least once in 1927. The works between 1904 and 1914 feature images from the San Francisco Bay Area, while the 1927-28 works feature images from Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara.[1] Out of his approximately 4000 works, Hassam's focus on California is relatively small, with only 12 major California paintings completed between 1914 and 1919. Additional minor works in the series include approximately 16 or so etchings from 1916 to 1928. Most of the works made in 1928 were based on drawings from 1927.[2] 11 of the 12 California paintings were created in 1914 and first exhibited as part of the "California Group" of 106 paintings total in the Exhibition of Pictures by Childe Hassam at the Montross Gallery in New York in 1915.[3] A twelfth painting in the series, California, has been dated to 1919.[4] The majority of Hassam's Calfiornia etchings were first exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1927.[5]
Historically, Hassam's work as an Impressionist in San Francisco was somewhat unique. Even though the works of the French Impressionists were first popularized in California by San Francisco art galleries in the 1890s, and had their first major public exhibition at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in 1915, just several years after New York's Armory Show,[6] artists in Northern California remained strongly attached to the style of tonalism, not Impressionism. The vast majority of artists who took up the style of California Impressionism did so in Southern California, not the north, leading to that region serving as the nexus for the short-lived legacy of regional Impressionism in the early 20th century.[7]
Several California artists found inspiration in Hassam's work and painted similar scenes in the Bay Area. In Northern California, members of the Society of Six in Oakland, California, were greatly influenced by the PPIE in 1915, which revealed works by French Impressionists, American Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Futurists for the first time in California. Plein-air artists Maurice Logan (1886–1977) and Selden Connor Gile (1877–1947), both members of the Society of Six, later painted works featuring hills in the Bay Area that are reminiscent of Hassam's treatment of similar landforms.[6] Art historian Will South compares Hassam to that of California Impressionist Guy Rose (1867–1925), finding that aside from their personality differences, they took similar career trajectories and even painted the same subjects in New York and California. Nevertheless, the wider art world has mostly ignored California Impressionists and other modernists. In 2002, South observed that large Impressionist exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and retrospectives of American modernism all ignored California-based artists.[8]
^ abcdefghijklmnopqrEliasoph, Paula (1933). Handbook of Etchings by Childe Hassam, N.A., 1883–1933. New York: Leonard Clayton Gallery. pp. 28, 58-61. OCLC3735340.
^ abBoas, Nancy (1998). The Society of Six: California Colorists. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 58-68, 128. ISBN9780520210547. OCLC35762633.
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