American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists

The present work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work in preparation by Kathleen M. Burnside and Stuart P. Feld (as draft no. 1908.049).

Provenance:

The Artist.

Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Portland, Oregon.

Matthew's Galleries, Lake Oswego, Oregon, September 21, 2010.

Private Collection.

Doyle, New York, Sale of November 5, 2013, Lot 162.

Acquired directly from the above sale.

Private Collection, New York.

Exhibited:

(Probably) Portland, Portland Art Museum, "Exhibition of Paintings of Eastern Oregon by Childe Hassam," 1908.

New York, Montross Gallery, "Exhibition of Paintings of Eastern Oregon by Childe Hassam," no. 32 (as Clouds and Mountains).

Literature:

Margaret E. Bullock, Childe Hassam: Impressionist in the West, Portland, p. 100 (as Clouds and Mountains).

Lot Note:

During the summer months, Childe Hassam routinely traveled to remote regions characterized by pristine wilderness. Most famously, he spent many summers on the Isles of Shoals, filling his canvases with luminous renderings of rocky shores and oceanic ebb and flow. In 1904 and 1908, he pursued similar en plein air artistic exploration in Oregon, at the invitation of his friend, author, and fellow artist C. E .S Wood.

In the summer of 1908, Hassam is known to have visited the Harney Basin in Malheur County, likely depicted in Landscape, Eastern Oregon (Clouds and Mountains). The work unfolds a subtle and rather uniform palette of grey, blue and green hues that complement and nearly echo each other, like the ever-receding hills in the distance, visually translating the landscape’s boundless quality. Hassam’s adept use of the cropping technique further captures the vastness of the land, only arbitrarily confined by the edges of the panel.

Hassam portrays nature as completely untouched, emphasizing its raw texture and immaculate appearance. His sharp observation of natural light through the playful interlocking of sunlit and shaded expanses brings forth the physicality of the landscape’s peaks and valleys, nearly coalescing with the equally textured clouds in the sky. Beyond Hassam’s impressionistic rendering of light, the physicality of the landscape is underlined by that of the panel, which, showing through and blending in with the paint, neatly completes the image with its earthy tint.