(1859 - 1935)
Frederick Childe Hassam was born in 1859 in Dorchester, Massachusetts. In 1876 he was apprenticed to a local wood engraver and later became a freelance illustrator. In 1883 Hassam traveled to Great Britain, Holland, Spain and Italy, where he produced a large number of watercolors that were exhibited at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston later that year. Hassam left for Europe in 1886 and studied figure painting at the Acadèmie Julian. In 1889 he returned to the United States and settled in New York where he assisted in founding the New York Watercolor Club and joined the Pastel Society of New York. He also began to exhibit with the Society of American Artists and in 1897, was a founder of The Ten.
A prolific and industrious artist, Hassam painted numerous scenes of both the city and the countryside. Many of his early street scenes of Boston, Paris and New York, with their reflections of wet pavement or of gaslight on the snow, evidenced a talent for capturing the effects of light and atmosphere.
