The exhibition explores the impact that Hassam’s presence had on the artists who worked in various Connecticut art colonies at the turn of the 19th Century. A selection of his Connecticut and New England paintings and works on paper are being shown alongside works by his contemporaries including Willard Metcalf, John Twachtman, Henry Ward Ranger, Charles H. Davis, and Emil Carlsen, among others.

The stylistic shifts from Barbizon to Impressionism in the works of many of these painters is explored, allowing viewers to gain a new appreciation for Hassam’s impact on the style and subject matter of Connecticut Impressionism.

Frederick Childe Hassam was born in Dorchester, Mass., and his earliest paintings were landscapes of Boston.

Returning from a European sojourn in 1889, the artist established himself in New York City and became one of the leading proponents of Impressionism in the United States.

He spent many productive seasons in Connecticut painting landscapes of the state’s rural environs, including Cos Cob, Old Lyme, and the Branchville farm of artist J. Alden Weir. From 1894 to 1923, Hassam made periodic visits to Cos Cob, where his friends and colleagues, J. Alden Weir and John Twachtman, were teaching. He painted and etched numerous views of the town’s historical architecture and picturesque harbor.

Following Twachtman’s death in 1902, Hassam became interested in another Connecticut retreat — Old Lyme. Henry Ward Ranger had founded the Old Lyme Art Colony in 1899 in the hope of establishing a center for Barbizon painting in America. Ranger and his colony embraced the dark tones and brooding pastoral subject matter of the French Barbizon style for their views of coastal Connecticut.

In 1903 Hassam joined these artists, staying at the home of innkeeper Florence Griswold. When he introduced the high-keyed palette and broken brush strokes of impressionist painting in his views of local scenery, he, perhaps inadvertently, disrupted Ranger’s dream of an American Barbizon.

Although Hassam introduced the “advanced style” of Impressionism, he chose nostalgic images of New England’s past for his Connecticut and New England works, which feature historic architecture, barns, town squares, Congregational churches, and contemplative women shown in rural landscapes and colonial room interiors.

Also setting the artist apart was the fact that although he painted directly from nature, used a palette dominated by pastel tones, and employed broken strokes of color to develop his compositions, Hassam nonetheless retained the identity of his subject rather than dissolving it in an envelope of light in the manner of the French Impressionists.

“Because of this approach, American Impressionism was distinguished from its European counterpart in holding on to its realist origins,” wrote Crocker Art Museum curator and acting director Janice T. Driesbach in December 1998. That winter, the Sacramento, Calif.-based Crocker Art Museum was presenting “Childe Hassam in the Crocker Art Museum Collection.”

“Hassam also began to incorporate Post-Impressionist stylistic devices into his work after 1900, which are reflected in the ambitious portrait ‘An Outdoor Portrait of Miss Weir,’ where the brushstrokes resemble blocks of color in many places,” Ms Driesbach pointed out.

The subject of the aforementioned portrait – which has been dated to 1909 – was originally identified as “Miss W” when the painting was exhibited in New York in 1926. It is now understood that the subject is in fact one of J. Alden Weir’s three daughters.

Hassam met Weir, a member of a prominent family of American artists, in early 1890. They quickly established a close friendship that was interrupted only by Weir’s death in 1919.

Weir, who was beginning to explore Impressionism at the time of their introduction, joined Hassam and eight other artists in leaving the conservative Society of American Artists in 1898 to establish The Ten American Artists, an exhibition group modeled on the Impressionists in France.

(Weir’s home, studios and property in Wilton have since been turned into a National Historic Site, the only one in Connecticut. Weir Farm preserved the summer home and workplace of Weir. The house, studios, farm buildings and landscape integral to Weir’s artistic vision survive largely intact, making it among the finest remaining landscapes of American Impressionism.)

Hassam was the American artist most closely associated with French Impressionist style. But, as Brigitte Foley, the assistant curator at The Columbus Museum, stated in her essay for a 1999 exhibition at the Georgia museum in 1999, he did not venture into the art of printmaking until the age of 56.

“He had the helpful background experience of working as an apprentice to a wood engraver and as an illustrator in his younger days,” wrote Ms Foley. “His mastery of the graphic arts is evident in this exhibition, and the prints reflect his remarkable ability to capture sunlight, atmosphere, and the color of the Impressionist style in black and white.”

An artist who relied on the sale of his paintings as his sole source of income, Hassam achieved considerable success during his lifetime. Among the honors he received was an invitation to display his artwork in a separate room at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which was held in San Francisco in 1915.

The artist went west to view the exhibition and spend time painting. After his return to the East, he painted “On the Palisades,” whose title refers to a well-known geologic feature along the Hudson River. In this view, rendered from the Palisades towards New York City, Hassam looked toward the home where he died in 1935, still the dean of the American Impressionist school.

Special Programs

There is one gallery talk and ongoing tours of the exhibition available at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Professor Robert Thorson, the author of Stone By Stone: The Magnificent History of New England Stone Walls, will offer a gallery talk on Friday, September 10, at noon. The lecture, “Connecticut Impressionism: Stone by Stone,” is included with museum admission.

Special exhibition tours are offered on Saturday afternoons at 1 and Sundays at 2:30 pm. These are also included with museum admission. Participants should meet in the Helen and Harry Gray Court (the museum’s main lobby).

Wadsworth Atheneum is at 600 Main Street in Hartford. It is open Tuesday through Friday from 11 am to 5 pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 10 and to 5 pm (please note the museum will be closed on Tuesdays beginning in September). The museum is open until 8 pm on First Thursdays most months.

Admission is $9 for adults, $7 for senior citizens, $5 for students and children ages 13 and under, and free for ages 12 and under. General admission is free until noon on Saturday except during special fundraising events. Group discounts for ten or more are available with advance reservations.

Contact the museum by calling 860-278-2670 (TDD is 860-278-0294). The museum’s website is www.WadsworthAtheneum.org.

Related Exhibitions

 The Wadsworth Atheneum show coincides with three related exhibitions: a Hassam retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and shows at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme and the Bush-Holley Historic Site in Greenwich.

“Childe Hassam, American Impressionist” remains on view at the Metropolitan Museum until September 12.

The New York exhibition is the first major retrospective of the artist held in a museum since 1972. The exhibition includes about 120 oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels and some 20 prints.

The exhibition takes a new look at Hassam’s distinctive images, in which he created enchanting effects of color and light, and examines these works in view of the artist’s credo that “the man who will go down to posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of every-day life around him.”

Featured are Hassam’s striking portrayals of Boston, Paris and New York and his nostalgic interpretations of country sites in America and Europe. Increasingly challenged by modern life — and modern art — after 1900, Hassam chose to paint tranquil interior vignettes, iconic New England churches, and his great Flag series, among other subjects. These are also highlighted.

The museum, at 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, can be contacted at 212-535-7710 (TYY 212-570-3828 or 212-650-2551). Its website is www.MetMuseum.org.

“Childe Hassam: Impressions of Cos Cob,” in The William Hegarty Gallery at Bush-Holley Historic Site, is being presented at a location that provided inspiration for many Hassam works.

Hassam’s enthusiastic foray into etching at the age of 56 was facilitated by Kerr Eby, a printmaker thirty years his junior, who had a press in his studio on Cos Cob’s waterfront.

With the benefit of Eby’s equipment and advice, Hassam created 62 etchings in 1915, thirty of them depicting Cos Cob subjects.

In that series, which Hassam himself considered his finest, he captured the play of sunlight over boats, barns and old houses, and portrayed serene women inside the Holley house.

A nearly complete set of the Hassam Cos Cob etchings are being shown together for the first time since 1916. Contemporary prints by Eby reveal the mastery he had achieved at the outset of his career.

Organized by guest curator Susan Larkin, the Bush-Holley show includes examples of the oils, pastels and watercolors Hassam produced in Cos Cob over morethan two decades. The exhibition offers unusual insight into the process of printmaking.

Inside and out, The Bush-Holley House is the subject of several of Hassam’s etchings. In addition to viewing “Childe Hassam: Impressions of Cos Cob” in the Hegarty gallery, visitors can view four rooms in the house furnished as they were when Hassam was a frequent guest. Oils, pastels and etchings by Hassam and other artists hang in the house, conveying a visit senseof the art colony period.

Bush-Holley Historic Site, a property of The Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich located at 39 Strickland Road, can be reached at 203-869-6899 or online at www.hstg.org.

Finally, “A Pretty Fine Old Town: Childe Hassam in Old Lyme,” at Florence Griswold Museum until September 26, has as its highlight the monumental painting “June.”

The mural-size painting, measuring seven by seven feet, portrays three nudes among the mountain Laurel buses on the banks of the Lieutenant River – showing Connecticut’s state flower and a signature subject for the Old Lyme painters. The artist was staying at the Florence Griswold House in 1905 when he began to work on the painting.

Undoubtedly Hassam conceived of the composition for June in Old Lyme, and probably executed the studies here, but it is more likely that he worked on the final canvas in his New York City studio, where he had more space to work.

“June” has not been on public view for over 90 years. The painting was exhibited in 1905 and 1906, when an entire gallery was devoted toit at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

It has been loaned by The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, which has owned the painting since Hassam’s death.

In addition to “June,” The Florence Griswold exhibition offers 22 paintings and works on paper, historic photos and archival materials portraying the breadth of Hassam’s Old Lyme work. The items place Hassam’s Old Lyme output in the context of the rest of his long and prolific career.

Visitors will also hear, from the museum’s docents, engaging stories of Hassam’s summers with Miss Florence and the other artists of the Lyme Art Colony. The artist called Miss Griswold’s inn “just the place for high thinking and low living.” Visitors will see the rooms in which he lived and worked and hear of the time Hassam hurled an orange through one of the windows of the dining room, his impromptu parades down the town’s main street, and evenings spent taking supper with “The Hot Air Club.”

Florence Griswold Museum is at 96 Lyme Street in Old Lyme. It can be reached at 860-434-5542 or online at www.FloGris.org.