Childe Hassam | dual personalities

Yours, yours. I was painted for you.

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of Frederick Childe Hassam (October 17, 1859 – August 27, 1935), one of our favorite American Impressionist painters, so it is a no-brainer what our post will be about.

Self-portrait

In case you were wondering, his name “Hassam” comes from a seventeenth-century English ancestor whose name, Horsham, had been corrupted over time to Hassam. At least, that’s what Wikipedia says.

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“End of the Trolley Line, Oak Park, Illinois”–a flyover subject!

Childe Hassam painting on Appledore

“Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling… but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”

―Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

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“Chair’d in the adamant of Time”*

by chuckofish

I feel so sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn’t mean it has to be the limit of your experience. Move about in time, go places. Why restrict your circle of acquaintances to only those who occupy the same stage we call the present?”

–David McCullough, “Recommended Itinerary” in Brave Companions

I concur.

As we approach Independence Day on July 4, why not read some history?

*Walt Whitman, “America”; the painting is by Childe Hassam.

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‘One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young’s theory that “as soon as we have found the key of life it opens the gates of death.” Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!’

– George Eliot

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January 31, 2014

No cloud above, no earth below,— A universe of sky and snow!”

by chuckofish

Yesterday’s post with the wonderful Hiroshige landscape got me thinking about my love of landscape paintings that include snow. I have always loved them. I don’t know why.

I have one in my kitchen which I love.