Childe Hassam Visits Paris - Red Shoes, Green Shoes

Seeing the ballet shoes in yesterday's post inspired me to find this image of Childe Hassam's wife, Maude Hassam, having a petit dejeuner in the Hôtel de l'Empire, a moderately-priced thirty-room hotel in Paris, France. Centrally located in Paris it catered to an American clientele. Hassam was on his fourth trip to Europe; it had begun in June 1910. He and Maude had travelled through England, the Netherlands and on into Belgium before arriving in Paris by the second week in July. The city, the artist wrote to his friend J. Alden Weir, was "a huge Coney Island-noisy, dirty." Cleanliness aside, the Hassams' room seems quite lovely. We see the blue-white patterns of the interior of the bed, the red tones of the outer canopy and the vivid green-orange texture of the room's wallpaper. Looking in the mirror on the left, it does seem the room is not too very large. Their night clothes are on the chair in the foreground. Black dress shoes are at the foot of the bed. And for me the most memorable item -- red slippers. Click those slipper/shoes and get transported back to New York.









Admittedly these green pumps are part of the 21st century but they and their owner who was sitting in Manhattan's Bryant Park would have likely drawn the attention of Childe Hassam.

The Dancer

Last year the Portland Art Museum* brought us The Dancer; Degas, Foraine and Toulouse Lautrec. When I saw Degas' tutus up close I found a new respect for his work. Nothing more than speckled dots of light on frothy clouds of crinoline, but magical. The tutu was begging to be painted by an impressionist.
We have this print "A Dancer Adjusting her Dress" by Degas in our collection. It's a pastel on paper from 1885. He did more than 1500 representations of dancers.

I too have been inspired by the dancer, as seen in this photograph of my niece at ballet practice six years ago. I no longer remember which feet are hers, this is the only photo on the negative contact sheet that doesn't show her face. It is also the one I most experimented with in the dark room. I have yet to perfect the portrait photo, the one that takes two subjects, both the face and the light.

Frederick Childe Hassam Renamed by Poet Celia Thaxter

Childe Hassam was invited to Celia Thaxter's artist colony in 1890. Thaxter was a poet of some means who had travelled to Europe and enjoyed the company of artists. At some point Thaxter discovered that her new friend Hassam's middle name was Childe. She suggested that he drop his first name Frederick since Childe seemed much more like that of an artist. So Childe it was from that point on. The video below shows some of his many paintings. Enjoy them as well as the opening photograph from New York taken in June 2008. It could have been of Childe Hassam's block in New York's East Village some warm summer evening.

Some of you may remember Celia Thaxter for her poems surrounding her garden and birds, including the now famous Sandpiper. General A. W. Greely, on the other hand, remembered another more somber poem that he and his crew read and reread while abandoned in the arctic for two years. The woman who renamed Hassam could fire up the imagination. Here in part is the telling poem about the sinking of a ship.

A Tryst 

By Celia Thaxter (1896)

From out the desolation of the North

An iceberg took it away,

From its detaining comrades breaking forth,

And traveling night and day.

At whose command? Who bade it sail the deep

With that resistless force?

Who made the dread appointment it must keep?

Who traced its awful course?

.....

.....

Scarcely her crew had time to clutch despair.

So swift the work was done:

Ere their pale lips could frame a speechless prayer,

They perished, every one!

Photography to Impressionists and Poetry is History

I've just read the article Poetry Don't Love History No More, by J. Dennis Robinson. His theory is that poetry and history have been happy bedfellows since the dawn of civilization but in our present society the cry for instant gratification replaced our attention span and appetite for epic verse. This is too bad, he says, because there are some fine stories in poem that you won't find yourself moved by if read in the style of a history book. I suspect the Impressionists felt similarly when the photograph was invented. They were not about to give up the epic poetry of painted visual representation because something simpler could be done. The Impressionists took on the challenge the photograph created; to do more than capture the outward appearance of things. In an attempt to capture emotion and the inner life, many artists often felt their work was incomplete, this is especially true of Monet and Renoir.
A contemporary critic Theodore Druet said of the Impressionists “Winter is here. The Impressionist paints snow. He sees that in the sunlight, the shadows on the snow are blue. Without hesitation he paints blue shadows. So the public laughs. Roars with laughter.”
Of course the photographer has a task, to see what is there, but is the patience to examine every hue and every shade of color required? She learns to frame, to wait for or search out the light, or set the lighting, but does she read light like an epic poem, taking days and weeks at a time? Does she read it in shades of blue? Does she know it that well?
I've posted a picture I took last summer from under a cherry tree, where I sat for an hour waiting for a bird to come to a branch low enough for me to capture him with a cheap point and shoot. The afternoon was still. I needed the mission of capturing an ordinary bird to get me to sit there long enough to remember I sat there. Childe Hassom wasn't part of this fast paced immediate gratification society, he took the time to paint New England Country Road, in the painting the slow movement of an old man on a country road is a reminder of the time painting takes. The half second halt of a bird in a cherry tree, the reminder that shooting a photograph takes but a second.

The Light Is Different

Wherever you go, the light is different. It's different at any time of the year. Childe Hassam, and the other Impressionists knew that. They would set up canvases and paint each one of them at different times. That concept of light was driven home most decidedly when we were in Stockholm several years ago. The time was autumn. The days were shorter but the shadows were longer. And in those seven days in Stockholm the shadows were always longer. What I found each day when the sun would appear was that it never rose above what we would have considered four o'clock here in Portland at that time of the year. Four o'clock is the perfect time for making images with your camera whether it is film or digital. I loved those days in Sweden, long walking days filled with the golden yellow of its fall. In actuality it was the fall of the heritage of myself and my husband, otherwise known as "Voice from the Couch". Bless him, he thinks of himself as being all Swedish, but he's only half as am I. But those halves must have constituted a whole in the minds of the locals. They consistently addressed us as if we were one of them and knew where they wanted to go when we didn't know much more then "hej".

The Window

"Photography, by its nature, deals with particulars -- with specific things and the light that bounces off them."
A. D. Coleman

From the article, A Poetics of the Quotidian: George Tice's Paterson Photographs

I am going to shed even more light on the subject by admitting that my husband John took this photo.

Childe Hassam – New England Country Road

Childe Hassam is known as an Impressionist painter. A charter member of the Ten, he painted in France for three years in the late 1880's, returning to the United States where he lived in New York City. Here in Portland, we know that he visited Oregon twice as the guest of CES Wood, one of the founders of the Portland Art Museum. Hassam was known for his paintings of New England and New York City done in the Impressionist style capturing the fleeting of effects of sunlight on his surroundings. This painting is of a New England Country Road and hangs in the American Galleries next to Hassam's Mt. Hood and Julian Alden Weir's portrait of CES Wood.

In celebration of light, this week's posts will be of Amy and LaValle's photographs. George Tice, photographer and PAM's guest lecturer on photography this last weekend, spoke about light and that in the case of photography by its nature deals with objects and the light that bounces off of them. Starting the stream of photos is this shot from Luang Prabang, Laos. The colors are very similar in both the Hassam and the photo. It's all in how the light hits each of them.