Childe Hassam (1859–1935) was an American painter credited with introducing Impressionism to the United States. He was a workman-like artist who made a living first as an illustrator, and then late in life as a highly popular impressionistic painter. A picture of his Paris at Twilight is part of the permanent collection at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. I look at it every time I visit.
Paris is an indifferent painting. It looks like one of those transposable street scenes you’d hang over the couch and, while pretty enough, doesn’t stick around in your head very long. I keep going back to it because the novelist Sinclair Lewis collected Hassam and very likely owned Paris at one time. Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was once upon a time widely and deservedly read; it is fair to say that he had more influence on American culture and politics than Hemingway and Fitzgerald combined. I’m sorry that he’s off the radar for most readers today.
If Lewis owned Paris he lost it in a divorce from his second wife, newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson, who left him because of his boozing. Lewis complained that, “Dorothy took everything, even the damn wallpaper!” We surmise that she took the pictures, too.
Two of America’s orneriest critics, H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, revered Lewis’s work and promoted his career. But neither liked him very much and made maliciously cruel fun of him for his boozing, for being a small-town rube, and for not being Ernest Hemingway. When they heard that he and Thompson were buying Hassam paintings, they exchanged lots of snarky commentary about, “Lewis buying his way into the Country Club.”
All of this is by way of saying that there is usually a story behind every picture. I don’t know enough about art to call Hassam a hack or hero, but I love thinking about where his pictures have been, and who might have looked at them at one time. If you get a chance to see Paris at Twilight, I’d love to know what you think about it.
I did see this Hassam at Crystal Bridges. It seems remarkably similar to the series that he did of Boston, which I viewed two years ago on a trip there. There’s a Boston Commons at dusk. In some respects, I think he Anercanized Paris. Although the lines create a quickly diminishing perspective, which pushes people and objects closer together and toward the viewer, the city elements are juxtapositioned with expanses of space. It would be interesting to know what interaction he had with photography, because the sepia light quality is similar to old prints.
I won’t bore anyone with thoughts on Sinclair Lewis, but I read him during my young anti-Vietnam period. Zola was also a fav. The inhumanity of the government and greedy corporations. My father, incidentally, would never eat a hot dog nor allow them to be served in the home. Because of Sinclair Lewis
Painting makes me want to go back to Paris !