Childe Hassam was one of the most prolific American Impressionist painters of his day, creating more than 3,000 works of art. In addition to his love of urban scenes, Hassam is known for his portraits, landscapes and figurative paintings. He enjoyed a successful career, commercial popularity and critical acclaim, cementing an enduring legacy in American art.
Hassam was born in 1859 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, as Frederick Childe Hassam. As a teenager, he apprenticed in an engraver’s workshop but later started working as an illustrator. Hassam took a life drawing class at the Boston Art Club and an anatomy class at the Lowell Institute. In 1883, he embarked on a journey to Europe, where he began producing watercolor paintings.
Hassam returned to Boston in 1884 and married Kathleen Maude Doane. In 1886, the couple traveled to Paris together, where Hassam studied at the Academie Julian and exhibited his work at the Parisian salons. They returned to America in 1889 and took up residence in New York City.
Along with Boston and Paris, New York City featured heavily in Hassam's urban paintings. Among his most famous works is Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain, representing Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.
Beginning in the 1890s, Hassam spent summers painting throughout Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire. He earned numerous accolades and exhibited at museums across the country by the turn of the century. In 1915, he turned his attention to prints and etchings.
Before he died in 1935, Hassam gifted the paintings in his studio to the American Academy of Arts and Letters with instructions that they be sold and the funds used to purchase American works. Today, his art is held in numerous museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
In 2016, the “Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas” exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden featured Hassam’s Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine among its showcase of American impressionist masters.
On 1stDibs, find original Childe Hassam prints, paintings, watercolor paintings and more.
Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.
Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.
Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.
Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.
Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.
“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.
Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.
For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)
Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.
