Muley the Pragmatist

In the golden twilight of the 19th century, most U.S. artists were mainly tourists. They had succumbed to what Henry James diagnosed as "the great American disease, the appetite for color and form, for the picturesque and romantic at any price." By the hundreds, they fled the industrial turmoil and cracker-barrel esthetics of their native U.S. for the postcard chateaux and quaint peasantry of Europe. But Ohio farmers on McCormick reapers did not fit into pretty landscapes as nicely as Normans driving oxcarts; few artists returned able to apply lessons learned abroad to the U.S. scene. One who did was Frederick Childe Hassam, a robust Bostonian who translated impressionism from French into pragmatic American.

In the year that the French impressionists last showed as a group--1886--the 27-year-old Hassam arrived in Paris. He had served an apprenticeship to a Boston wood engraver, then worked as an illustrator for Harper's, Scribner's and Century magazines. As a current retrospective exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts shows (see opposite page), his brush was already sensing moods of light and time of day. He was far removed from the established neoclassical Parisian academicians, whose plump-fleshed vignettes of rapine, bustle, moments of battle and historical panoramas were the fine art of the day. But his tone still smacked of old-masterish umber.

Stubborn Gentility. At the Academic Julian, with its ateliers crowded by easels and nudes, the young Yankee drank in the French artists' sense of professionalism. He also suffered from a nonacademic thirst for painting nature directly, out of doors. Soon he was outside, capturing with rapid brush strokes the luminous sparkle of Paris streets after quick cloudbursts. Detail dropped out. Against an overcast, his clusters of black umbrellas suggested swollen, devilish halos. Unlike Sargent, Whistler or Mary Cassatt before him, Hassam returned to the U.S. after three years in France. He settled in New York, rendering its parks and pavements with a stubborn gentility that admitted only such locales as Central Park and Fifth Avenue as proper subjects for oils. He excoriated the Ashcan School as "contemptuaries." He accused the public of admiring "every dab of paint that comes out of dressmaking Paris." He called critics "dolts, asses, dullards who rave about impressionism and realism without knowing what Prussian blue is." And dealers were plain "racketeers." Hassam was so single-mindedly American that Fellow Painter Frederic Remington dubbed him "Muley."

Flying Flags. In the countryside, Hassam maintained that "New England churches have the same kind of beauty as Greek temples." He made the church in Old Lyme, Conn., his version of Monet's Rouen cathedral, painting it through all the o'clocks of light. Another favorite subject was the banners that billowed above city streets; he shuttled their bright colors back and forth through his works, loosening background images to mingle with the flat patterns of flags.

His images were hardly unappreciated: in one good year, he made $100,000 from his works. The burly artist bought a 17th century house in East Hampton, L.I., settled in the painterly light that has drawn artists to the region for 150 years. An impressive figure even in later life, he would daily stalk across the dunes in a 200-year-old Chinese robe, fling it off, and plunge into the surf. Occasionally, Hassam even departed from pragmatism, painting such fantasies as Adam and Eve Walking Out on Montauk Point in Early Spring. Whereas Monet in his old age quietly painted his water lilies, the American impressionist traced the rustic tranquillity of the Hamptons' shingled cottages, windmills, and seacoast up to the day he died in 1935.

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