Edition: U.S. / Global

ART REVIEW; America's Favorite Impressionist

Published: July 25, 2004

IF you live in Connecticut and you haven't stumbled across a painting by the popular American Impressionist Childe Hassam in the last day or so, you're not trying very hard.

To coincide with the current Hassam retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, five Connecticut art institutions are devoting exhibitions to the artist. Although not a native son (he was raised in Boston and lived mostly in New York), Hassam was arguably the premier Impressionist painter of New England. He was also an influential figure in Connecticut art colonies in the early 1900's.

For the most part, Hassam (1859-1935) minted glitzy simulations of French Impressionist paintings, especially those by Monet. But they were so beguiling that it earned him ardent admirers and the patronage of the American establishment. By some accounts, he produced more than 4,000 paintings and prints; if you're lucky, there's one hiding in your attic.

Relying mostly on works from the state's museums and private collections, these Connecticut exhibitions help broaden our understanding of the artist and his career. Each exhibition concentrates on an aspect of his substantial and varied body of work, sometimes offering the added attraction of seeing the paintings in the surroundings with which they are intimately connected.

Hassam began his career as an illustrator. He joined the offices of a Boston wood engraver at age 19, where he learned to design letterheads and logos before graduating to illustrations for magazines and journals. By age 23 he had his own studio on Boston's School Street, was exhibiting his work publicly and had discarded his given name, Frederick, in favor of Childe, his middle name.

Hassam's formal art education was piecemeal. But he was gifted, as an early painting like ''Columbus Avenue, Rainy Day'' (1885) makes clear. On view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in the exhibition ''Childe Hassam and Connecticut Impressionism,'' it shows a wet Boston street, the shiny pavement catching reflections of passing people and vehicles. Delicately tonal in style, it is a lively, atmospheric painting.

The Wadsworth's exhibition, organized by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, offers a small but focused survey of Hassam's career. It also tries to put his work in context, including paintings by his American colleagues and peers.

To some critics, American Impressionism is an oxymoron. Partly they are right, for the tighter finish and cold, hard facts of Realism attracted many of America's most talented 19th-century painters. In addition, the Impressionism practiced by American artists, including Hassam (at least initially), owed a great deal to the informal, tonally nuanced naturalism of the French Barbizon School (circa 1835 to circa 1870).

Like many of his talented American peers, Hassam traveled to Paris to study. He arrived in 1886, and once there he began to experiment with Impressionism, absorbing elements of the style: the lighter chromatic palette, the short, broken brushwork, and a preference for soppy garden views and society scenes. He had found his métier.

Painted in Paris in 1887, ''At the Cafe,'' also at the Wadsworth, demonstrates the artist's widening knowledge of Impressionism. Aside from the typically Impressionist subject matter and newly energetic brushwork, the painting shows the artist moving away from the gloomy tones of his Boston scenes toward a lighter palate.

After three years in France, Hassam and his wife, Kathleen Maud Doane, returned to the United States, making their home in New York. From there, in 1890, Hassam began making extended summer painting trips to Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and -- from around 1894 -- Connecticut. For the artist, the allure of Connecticut was twofold: artist friends and the state's abundance of subjects that heralded New England's historic past.

The harbor village of Cos Cob, near Greenwich, was one of Hassam's favorite stomping grounds. He painted there, on and off, between 1894 and 1918, often staying at the Holley House, where artists and writers had assembled since the early 1890's. From there he would make day trips to the fishing port or into the countryside, painting the landscape of venerable trees, farms and aging Colonial buildings.

During this time he also painted a series of fashionably dressed young ladies in genteel interiors -- many set in the Holley House. ''The Goldfish Window'' (1916) at the Wadsworth is a particularly fine example, as is ''The Mantelpiece,'' a little oil painting on a cigar-box lid included in a delightful exhibition of Hassam's Cos Cob works in the William Hegarty Gallery at the Bush-Holley Historic Site there.

The Cos Cob exhibition, organized by Susan G. Larkin, a Hassam scholar, includes oil paintings, watercolors, pastels and etchings, along with archival material. The exhibition features most of Hassam's Cos Cob etchings, shown together for the first time in almost a century.

Hassam turned studiously to etching during extended visits to Cos Cob in 1915. Teaming with a skilled local printmaker, Kerr Eby, he etched and pulled around two-dozen Impressionistic prints of village life. These dainty scenes, long hostage to fusty archivists, evince a warm, sumptuous joy. Take the time to see them, for their acquaintance is one of the real fringe benefits of the current Hassam-fest.