Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

This painting will be included in Stuart P. Feld’s and Kathleen M. Burnside’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

Provenance:

The artist
Milch Gallery, New York
Private collection, New York

As a child, Hassam displayed significant talent as a draftsman. He planned a career in art early in life, but the financial collapse of his father’s merchant business forced him to leave high school at the age of seventeen to aid in the support of his family. He initially worked in the accounting department of a publishing company, but it was clear that his facility with numbers was not his strength. Spurred by his ambition, he left the publishing department and apprenticed with a wood engraver in 1876. He took evening classes at the Boston Art Club and studied art privately as well.

Hassam’s early aesthetic was shaped considerably by Boston’s leading artist of the time, William Morris Hunt (Hassam was related via his paternal grandfather to the Hunt family), who, in turn, had been inspired by the Barbizon School of painters (among the best known were Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet and Theodore Rousseau). In defiance of the academy, the Barbizon painters treated nature as a subject unto itself, without historicist or spiritual references; they included portraits of the common man at work, a subject deemed inappropriate for high art.

Hassam’s education continued with his first trip to Europe in 1883. He was exposed to an enormous array of art in England, France, Holland, Italy and Spain. Hassam’s first significant solo exhibition occurred in Boston upon his return from Europe. The artist showed watercolors indebted to both Hunt and the Barbizon painters. The show received excellent reviews. He returned to Europe in 1886 and took instruction at the Académie Julian, while exhibiting to considerable acclaim at the Salon and in private galleries. Returning to the United States in 1889 and settling in New York City, Hassam soon exhibited paintings that showed the influence of French Impressionism. His palette, previously muted in the earth tones of the Barbizon School, exploded with rapturous color. Yet his brushwork technique was more precise and focused than that of the French Impressionists.

His painting output was prodigious, but he also found time to write extensively and with eloquence in his championing of an American art. Hassam disavowed the received idea that his work was based solely on European art; he was an avid promoter that American painters were, at the very least, equals of contemporary Europeans. The predilection of many art collectors solely for European art was especially irksome to the artist, although he himself enjoyed a lifetime of critical acclaim and commercial success.

Hassam moved his family from New York City to East Hampton on Long Island in 1919. As a painter who drew from his immediate surroundings and often painted en plein air, his work shifted significantly following the move. Flying Point Beach beautifully exemplifies these stylistic shifts. On Long Island, Hassam came to favor horizontal compositions, with a considerable adjustment of scale to illustrate the vastness of the sky and the countryside. Landscape became of paramount importance, as it had been in the early years of his career, although now his exceptional gifts with the painter’s brush and compositional strategies were a given. But Hassam continued to explore and evolve. Flying Point Beach offers a panoramic view of the East Hampton seaside shortly after sunrise. The sky is a mellifluent blend of blues, whites and pinks. The sand dunes are delicately scalloped; the grass atop them is rendered with meticulous strokes of green. This careful paint application is perhaps most evident in the brushwork of the water (and the reflections upon it) and the marsh grasses in the foreground, applied in small strokes with a surprisingly wide selection of colors (including red, pink and peach). The technique is one of both exactitude and sumptuousness. The result is a luminous and mysterious landscape, yet somehow grounded in realism.

Inserted throughout are several vertical nude figures—a signature of Hassam’s mature work—totemic and stationery, they contribute to the fantastic atmosphere. This vertical figuration is integral to Flying Point Beach. They suggest the work of those contemporaries of Hassam working in a Symbolist mode (Dewing, LaFarge and Ryder), adding a spiritual dimension. But the figures are also a testament to Hassam’s compositional strategies. In addition to the aura supplied by these nudes, they create a strong counterpoint to the painting’s horizontal orientation. Their visual punctuation harmonizes the work and reveals how profoundly Hassam understood the dynamics of spatial relationships upon the picture plane. Flying Point Beach reveals Hassam at his most sublime: beautiful, mysterious, vigorous and yet placid, here is a master in full control of his medium.