CHILDE HASSAM (1859-1935)
Mount St. Helens / Louwala-Clough (2, 549 m - 8, 363 ft)
Mount Adams / Patho or Klikitat (3, 473m - 12, 281ft)
United States of America (Washington State)
United States of America (Washington State)
In Adams and St. Helen's, Early Morning, watercolor, 1887, Private collection
The mountains
Mount St. Helens or Louwala-Clough (2, 549m- 8,363 ft) knownas Lawetlat'la to the Cowlitz people, and Loowit to the Klickitat people, is an active stratovolcano located in Skamania County, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is 96 miles (154 km) south of Seattle, Washington, and 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Portland, Oregon. Mount St. Helens takes its English name from the British diplomat Lord St Helens, a friend of explorer George Vancouver who made a survey of the area in the late 18th century.The volcano is located in the Cascade Range and is part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a segment of the Pacific Ring of Fire that includes over 160 active volcanoes. This volcano is well known for its ash explosions and pyroclastic flows.
Mount Adams or Patho or Klikitat (3, 473m - 12, 281ft) is
a potentially active stratovolcano in the Cascade Range, USA. Although
Adams has not erupted in more than 1,000 years, it is not considered
extinct. It is the second-highest mountain in the U.S. state of
Washington, after Mount Rainier/Tacoma. Mount Adams
is a member of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, and is one of the arc's
largest volcanoes, located in a remote wilderness approximately 34 miles
(55 km) east of Mount St. Helens.
The Mount Adams Wilderness consists of the upper and western part of
the volcano's cone. The eastern side of the mountain is designated as
part of the territory of the Yakama Nation.
More about Mt Adams The painter
Frederick Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.
In 1904 and 1908, he traveled to Oregon and was stimulated by new subjects and diverse views, frequently working out-of-doors with friend, lawyer and amateur painter Colonel C. E. S. Wood.
He produced over 100 paintings, pastels, and watercolors of the High Desert, the rugged coast, the Cascades, scenes of Portland. As usual, he adapted his style and colors to the subject at hand and the mood of place, but always in the Impressionist vein. With the art market now eagerly accepting his work, by 1909 Hassam was enjoying great success, earning as much as $6,000 per painting. His close friend and fellow artist J. Alden Weir commented to another artist : "Our mutual friend Hassam has been in the greatest of luck and merited success. He sold his apartment studio and has sold more pictures this winter, I think, than ever before and is really on the crest of the wave. So he goes around with a crisp, cheerful air."
The most distinctive and famous works of Hassam's later life comprise the set of some 30 paintings known as the "Flag series". He began these in 1916 when he was inspired by a "Preparedness Parade" (for the US involvement in World War I), which was held on Fifth Avenue in New York (renamed the "Avenue of the Allies" during the Liberty Loan Drives of 1918).Thousands participated in these parades, which often lasted for over twelve hours.
Being an avid Francophile, of English ancestry, and strongly anti-Germany, Hassam enthusiastically backed the Allied cause and the protection of French culture.
In 1919, Hassam purchased a home in East Hampton, New York. Many of his late paintings employed nearby subjects in that town and elsewhere on Long Island. In 1920, he received the Gold Medal of Honor for lifetime achievement from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and numerous other awards through the 1920s. Hassam traveled relatively little in his last years, but did visit California, Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico.
He died in East Hampton in 1935, at age 75.
He denounced modern trends in art to the end of his life, and he termed "art boobys" all the painters, critics, collectors, and dealers who got on the bandwagon and promoted Cubism, Surrealism and other avant-garde movements. Until a revival of interest in American Impressionism in the 1960s, Hassam was considered among the "abandoned geniuses". As French Impressionist paintings reached stratospheric prices in the 1970s, Hassam and other American Impressionists gained renewed interest and were bid up as well.
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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
