Opinion: Childe Hassam's East Hampton Summers

Anyone who has feelings of loyalty toward East Hampton as an idyllic summer retreat (and who doesn't?) should go to see Guild Hall's current exhibit, "Childe Hassam: East Hampton Summers."

The paintings of Hassam, the popular American Impressionist who was born near Boston and did his artistic apprenticeship in Paris, describe many of East Hampton's best-loved landmarks, including Home, Sweet Home, the Hook Mill, the Maidstone Club, and the Devon Yacht Club.

The show of 65 works (including paintings, watercolors, etchings by the artist, and vintage photographs of places depicted in the paintings) also features a film made in 1932 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, showing the portly, well-heeled artist during the last years of his life at his home on Egypt Lane.

Productive Old Age

This well-conceived and beautifully executed exhibit is not particularly exciting for the artworks it showcases. There is little variation within the oeuvre, and some of the thinner works seem little more than highly competent magazine illustrations. Nevertheless it is fascinating, and ultimately satisfying.

Hassam was a great success in life, and his old age in East Hampton was both happy and productive. If his work was not particularly innovative during this period, at least it featured moments of joyful inspiration.

The two earliest works at Guild Hall date from 1898, when the artist was 39, nine years after his return from Europe, where he had absorbed the ideas and techniques of the Impressionists with complete success.

Only A Visitor

One caveat: In the desire to associate Childe Hassam with East Hampton, the show's guest curator, John Esten, and the Guild Hall press office have been somewhat overzealous in rewriting history. Hassam did not, as the press release would have it, "work on the East End of Long Island from 1898 to 1935."

In fact, until 1919 the artist, whose best seaside work was done on Appledore Island off the coast of New Hampshire but whose haunts also included Gloucester and Provincetown in Massachusetts and Old Lyme, Conn., visited East Hampton only occasionally. From 1919 until his death in 1935 (that is, in the last 16 years of his life) he made East Hampton his summer home.

Throughout this time, however, his permanent residence, like that of many East Hampton summer people, was New York.

Which Seaside?

Apart from the 1898 "July Night," a night painting with a distinctly uncharacteristic pre-Raphaelite feeling, the works are entirely Barbizon in feeling: bright, highly keyed Impressionist paintings that describe the dazzling light of seaside in high summer.

The only problem is, it doesn't seem entirely like East Hampton light. The works that seem to correspond most closely with actual light conditions here are those that depict houses and gardens in town, where dappled sunlight filters down through the elms and horse chestnuts.

Those which are least representative of the light one actually encounters depict bay or ocean views across open swathes of golf course - these seeming, in their luxuriant orange and cobalt palettes, more worthy of St. Tropez or Cap d'Antibes.

"Adam And Eve On Montauk"

This tendency is taken to its ultimate excess in one of the most singular images in the show, a 1924 allegorical painting, "Adam and Eve Walking Out on Montauk in Early Spring."

In this extraordinary image, Adam and Eve tread nude, accompanied by sheep, across the moors surrounding Lake Montauk, under warm, crystal-clear skies. Anyone who has actually spent time here in early spring (or, for that matter, late spring) will surely be amazed by this image.

The exhibit is well-documented, allowing viewers to compare Hassam's images of houses with photographs dating mostly from the mid-1920s. The photos are themselves quite interesting, showing East Hampton in the days before it was tamed by lawn mowers, asphalt, and privet.

Hassam As Printmaker

Another delight is the survey of Hassam's prints (though not even the elegant 60-page catalogue can inform us if these are etchings, engravings, drypoint, or some combination of the three), which delineate the beautiful sun-dappled streetscapes and architectural landmarks of East Hampton through line rather than color.

Hassam was an accomplished printmaker; though his images have a certain lack of focus, they describe light beautifully.

One of the most touching images in the show is a watercolor created when the artist was 74 years old. The little painting shows Hassam, in a bathing cap and trunks, plunging into the ocean at the Maidstone Club. It is called "Through the Breakers on His Birthday, October 17th, 1933."

This image, and a late, vivid, Matisse-y painting of "Mrs. Hassam's Garden at East Hampton (July 4, 1934)," suggest that Hassam's last years in East Hampton were very happy ones indeed.