Coming Across Boston Common at Dusk

and now here with her latest book please join me in welcoming Erica her slur [Applause] thank you very much there is a book actually just hot off the press and inexpensive I do not get royalties so buy a lot and support the Museum of Fine Arts I'd like to also remind everybody if you could please put your cell phone off or at least silent I would be very grateful here we are Boston Common a painting called at dusk it's only a few minutes after 4:00 but the Sun is disappearing rapidly leaving the sky a radiant orange pink that eclipses the ruddy buildings and transforms them into hulking shadows save for the occasional glow of a shop window or the reflected sheen of dying light the street lights along Tremont Street have started to brighten everything is moist and suffused with red it's damp and cold the trodden snow slippery underfoot the girls insist on feeding the birds just City sparrows but the children are determined to offer the creatures some crusts the smaller girl holds back timid chilled and maybe less convinced the woman reaches forward to gather up her charges and to get them home into the warmth and away from the crush of street cars and their spill of passengers a group of them now marching up the promenade enjoying their cigars and the sting of frozen air before heading inside to whatever domestic bliss or affliction awaits them and it's with this scene in mind that child Hassim turns around heads up the block to his studio well I set myself the project of learning the story of this painting to try and ascertain the various ways in which it was both traditional and modern and to see how it fit into houses career and into the history of Boston I learned that both Hassim and the city he depicted in 1885 86 were at points of transition the artists from a magazine illustrator and pastoral water colorist to an ambitious painter and a chronicler of the modern scene Boston changing from a Yankee enclave of stately brick and granite row houses to an eclectic an increasingly diverse commercial center led by its first Irish mayor has painting projects the calm and elegant charm but nonetheless it registers these tumultuous shifts in the urban fabric including the city's crowns of workers and shoppers new ideas about appropriate social behavior for women modern developments in public transportation and lighting and constant frenetic building campaigns that were remaking the streets around Boston Common I'll start today with the artist child Hassim seen here in a later photo from the 1890s in his studio Hassim was at the very beginning of his career when he painted his carefully observed view of Boston Common at Twilight and in fact his studio is just around the corner on West Street so the scene he painted would have been very familiar to him assam was born in 1859 and raised in Dorchester Massachusetts he was the son of Frederick Fitch Hassim a merchant and his wife Rosa Hawthorne Hassim Frederick Hassim was a Cutler a manufacturer of high-quality razors and knives who joined his brother Roswell Hassim in business on Washington Street and you can see here the listing in the ball in city directory from 1862 Hassim brothers cutler's and they supplied bowie lives like the ones one that you see it up or right to Union soldiers during the Civil War both of haslums parents were proud of their long New England lineage Frederick Hassim collected historic American furnishings and the artist Hassim later remembered making his very first sketches of an old-fashioned coach that his father had bought and kept in the family barn in Dorchester young Hassim showed an aptitude for drawing during his public school years and in the late 1870s after failing to thrive in his first job as an accountant he turned to art as a profession in 1876 he began to study with a wood engraver in Boston working as an illustrator for magazines advertisements trade cards and the like his early career very similar to another Boston artists Winslow Homer this of course was the Golden Age of the American Illustrated press and I'm just showing you here pages from Harper's Magazine one of the many Illustrated journals that were popular at the time and at the lower right an image of men at work and a wood engraving shop at one of these magazines these illustrated journals and the pictures they contained were an important source for some of Hassim x' earliest themes early on he also studied anatomy and figure drawing although to be honest with you he was never very good at drawing the human form I'm showing you here too early examples of Hassim s-- work one of which might be familiar to you the banner headline of the Marblehead messenger perhaps this first city view looking across the harbor at the town and at the bottom a book by Ernest Shurtleff called when I was a child which has some Illustrated in 1880 six he also worked in watercolor you see two examples here trees in bloom from 1885 at the top and Country Road from 1882 at the bottom he made mostly scenes of a Nantucket and other rural New England countryside images which he displayed and sold at a local art gallery we can see in his work the same kind of interest in rural subjects that mark the work of the French Barbizon School which was so popular in Boston at the time finally in 1882 Hassim changed his listing in the Boston City Directory from draftsman to artists in 1883 he went to Europe for the first time made where he made these two watercolors on the left an image of the Venetian Lagoon from 1883 and at the lower right of view of the seaside Esplanade at Dunkirk the one on the right now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum has him toward London and Paris and traveled across the continent but we don't really know what he saw and what he did it's often been said that has some developed his interest in scenes of modern life in Paris in London but when he came back to the United States after his trip he turned his attention to the Past again painting timeless rural scenes and historic buildings in and around Boston and here two examples on the left the MFA's own Fairbanks house Dedham from 1884 on view in our arts and crafts gallery on level 2 of the wing and on the right picture from the Brooklyn Museum a back road from 1884 the Fairbanks house on your left was built in 1636 and in the 1880s it was already famous as a landmark it was published in a popular book called homes of our forefathers and Hassim probably knew about it for a long time of course images like this one of these historic sites coincide completely with a new interest in American cultural history a new interest in architectural preservation the Hancock house that great Georgian mansion on Beacon Street had been demolished in 1863 and Old South Church was next up for demolition this caused a whole group of people to rally around the cause of saving these architectural monuments of the colonial past Old South was saved in 1877 and this interest in the buildings themselves made subject matter like this increasingly popular and by 1894 one writer observed that the Fairbanks house was and I quote overrun with devotees of the easel and sketching block and that miss Fairbanks the descendant has still lived in the house had and I quote trouble keeping the dooryard clear of these budding roffels what Hassim does is emphasize the mass of this elongated house how it rises from the hill and seems almost to be part of the landscape and the figure that he shows in front of it seems timeless she could be contemporary from 1884 she could be from the colonial past and we see this kind of approach in the work of any number of painters of this period including John Anna King whose view of another historic house the Roundy house on the Neponset River you see at the upper right painting from the MFA's collection or even in the bucolic nostalgic rural scenes of Winslow Homer whose feeding time from the 1870s at lower right is in the collection of the Clarke well Hassim also has as perhapses ultimate source the work of one of these French Barbasol painters so popular in Boston and I'm showing you on the right me lays priori at vivillon Normandy from 1872 in the MFA's collection what Hassim is doing is Americanizing that Barbizon style using the same kind of rustic subjects a sort of muted palette a direct painting content technique and a distaste for any complicated storytelling or narrative typically of american art passim in gives up any idea of social commentary instead his view is romantic and nostalgic well the other thing that Hassim did when he got back from Europe was to show his European watercolors at Boston's Williams and Everett gallery in 1884 he showed 67 watercolors there including the one you see it up a right again the Esplanade at Dunkirk they the watercolors in the checklist consist almost entirely of the European village street scenes and picturesque rural vistas that he had painted the year before boats beaches cottages canals but one watercolour in the group points to a new direction in haslums art for slipped into that exhibition checklist in between a Spanish town and the Tower of san marco and the Doge's Palace was a new subject Beacon Street and the public garden morning which probably looked something like the work at lower right has soms Boston Public Garden from about 1885 there had been other changes for Hassim as well in 1884 he married Catherine Madone who shows here in this particularly beautiful watercolor called Maude sewing from 1883 Katherine down was the daughter of a photographer who had established himself as a daguerreotypist in Montreal but when that technology went out the window with new advances in photography he came to Boston and became an artist Katharine and child Hassim moved into this building the Arba morale in Boston's newly expanded South End this is at Columbus and Clarendon Street it's still there as you can see built in 1876 it was an apartment building of French flats which means that the apartments instead of being up and down were all on a single level and from this apartment building on Columbus Avenue Hassim began to paint his own surroundings and I'm showing you here two of his views of Columbus Avenue at the upper left one from the Worcester Art Museum at lower right one from the courrier Art Gallery in Manchester both of them 1885 both of them looking up Columbus Avenue looking north east towards the clock tower that you can see in the distance which once stood at the Providence Boston and Providence railway station which used to be in Park Square and you can see he's interested in showing the same view at different times of day Hassim wrote that Columbus Avenue was and I quote all paved and asphalt and I used to think it very pretty when it was wet and shining and caught the reflections of passing people and vehicles I was always interested in the movements of humanity in the street and I painted my first picture from my window the subject matter of urban life in the modern city is one of the may favorites Eames of course of the French Impressionists although Haslam's views and his palate are quite different with dark rust-red tonalities that are more often associated with that Barbizon School aside from our own painting the most famous of these views is this one rainy day Boston from 1885 now in the Toledo Museum of Art it documents the wonderful transformation of Boston during this period with its new broad boulevards it's French inspired architecture of mansard roofs lining the avenues of the expanded public transportation just visible here with a trolley car that you can see in the distance this neighborhood had only been developed in the 1870s and 80s everything you see was really brand new and has soms image celebrate that modernity the wide Boulevard with its ample room for carriages horse-drawn trolleys and well drop well-dressed pedestrians the innovative asphalt pavement replacing cobblestones the relentless recession of new and similarly styled buildings critics responded that Hasson unusually had made great beauty out of and that quote silent piles of brick and stone houses whose facades looked so moist and grim if you're wondering where this is Columbus Avenue at the intersection of West Canton Street this is the same building now obscured by trees it's about the only thing that's left you're looking down to where the tower of the station used to be a lot of people think that Hassim must have seen Kyah boats Paris rainy day from 1876 seven now in the Art Institute of Chicago and haslums work has been compared directly to that of the French Impressionists most notably to this Chaya bond but despite their superfish Schull similarities kya bots painting is much more modern with its flattened decorative forms its silhouettes and it's cropped figures and Hassim was extremely unlikely ever to have seen kya bots painting Paris Street rainy day had been shown in the third impressionist exhibition in 1877 in Paris and it received a lot of notice in the French language press but then the painting disappeared entirely from public view until after kaaya BOTS death in 1894 Hassim was much more likely to have been influenced by this kind of art painters that the so called juste Miglia the painters who were much less avant-garde than their Impressionists counterparts but who also took an interest in modern life Hassim certainly would have been prints that crossed the Atlantic so freely and I'm showing you an example here by a French artist named Felix puo from 1876 showing winter morning on the Kay Hotel did you in Paris with a similar lineup of carriages on a rainy Street as an illustrator Hassim certainly would have seen images like this one has some claimed that photographs were not at all part of his artistic practice but surely his on was informed by them particularly the popular and ubiquitous city scenes that were available in the form of stereo graphs like the one you see at the bottom showing Old South Church and they too often employ this rushing foreground wide open and a deep sense of perspective when looking at haslums work we might also consider the work of an Italian painter named Giuseppe - nitish whose work you see here on the right this one in a private collection showing Piccadilly and in 1875 Daenerys was active in Paris exhibited widely there and was a friend of none other than Gustave kya baat whom he knew and with whom he had worked and Dan Innis is often cited as a source for kiya bots on paintings so all of these works lead us to our main event at dusk Boston Common at Twilight rush hour Tremont Street 1885 the same year that Henry James published his novel the Bostonians and what Hassim shows us is the contrast between the bustle of lights and streetcars on the left with the calm snow Laden Park on the right he uses a dramatic receding perspective marked off with those repeating lines of trees benches fence posts bollards which seem to accelerate as they move towards the back perhaps an imitation of the accelerating rhythm of the modern city he uses a dull palette of Twilight enlivened with flickers of orange he's fascinated with different kinds of light artificial light of the street lights the natural light of the sky and my favorite the lip glow of the end of a cigarette well where are we exactly looking at this scene it's an area we know well and thanks to Google Maps we can see that we are somewhere along Tremont's Street and if we look at a map I've pointed out the direction for you Hassim must have been standing somewhere where Tremont Street straightens out because we don't see any evidence of a curve in his composition so he must have been standing somewhere between present-day West and Avery streets well what was this area like when Hassim was there here's an 1883 map of the same place and I forgive the orientation of the map which is shifted now the old maps don't always have north at the top but here we are West Street and Avery Street this is Boylston and Hassim is somewhere in here we can look closer and see that each individual structure is outlined showing the property owners names some of them showing new buyers as these maps are updated over time the 1885 insurance map of this area shows even what the buildings are made of mostly brick with wouldn't wouldn't bits outlined in blue it turns out that the neighborhood that Hassim was showing was one of the most mutable and changeable in Boston it had changed rapidly and would change many times over our first glimpse of the street can be seen very early this is a 1743 map made by William Price and here is Tremont's tree with the double row of trees at the common tremon Street was one of the earliest roads in Boston first recorded in 1635 and named for the three peaked ridge that occupied the northwest portion of the original Shama Peninsula on which Boston was built by the mid 18th century which you see here the basic configuration of the street has some depicted had already been set it began in the middle of the peninsula and it continued changing its name from Tremont to common street and heading in this direction Southwest along the edge of the common which by that time as you can see already boasted that double line of trees at the time of the revolution this is a 1776 map British troops put up their barricades in the common right opposite you can see trim up to common Street here are the trees again the British troops made their entrenchments right behind that Esplanade of trees building up mortal multiple fortifications on the common but the mall and its trees survived to the revolution and the few wooden Georgian mansions that were across the street passed from royalist to Patriot hands by 1810 some of those wooden houses most of them in fact had been replaced by a distinguished suite of brick townhouses designed by Charles Bulfinch the architect of the Massachusetts State House and one of the most important visionaries to plan Boston's development this new block which you see here in two photographs was called colonnade row and it consisted of 19 four-story houses each with four columns supporting a second-story ironwork balcony an Orem mental balustrade painted white bordered each roof the houses were between Avery and West streets and there were several others that were built in the same style they weren't identical in width or in decoration but presented an elegantly uniform appearance along the length of the block and they attracted the most distinguished of residents mainly merchants and lawyers the inhabitants looked out from their windows directly across to the Tremont Street Mall which was now defined by three rows of trees the street was residential the main business district was still several blocks away toward the north and east towards the harbor and there were as yet no streetcars and little traffic one of the city's most notable parades passed by here in August 1824 when General Lafayette made his triumphal return to the United States stopping his procession along colonnade row to offer a salute to the patriot and statement statesman John Hancock's Widow Dorothea Hancock who was watching from one of these balconies but soon the harmony was broken with new construction I'm showing you here the earliest section of a building called the Evans house a five-story mansard roof Italianate brownstone that was erected in 1850 960 and then expanded in the late 1860's and even at its modest five-story height you can see how it towered over the extent row houses and the stores that came to populate its ground and second floors hastened the shift along the street from residential to commercial by 1865 the Evans house was advertised as a residential hotel pleasantly situated according to an 1881 guidebook it offered elevator service and all modern improvements it was favored by actors who appreciated its proximity to the theaters that were one block back on Washington Street and it also housed the influential Boston cooking school which offered classes at the Evans house beginning in 1879 almost 20 years before alumna Fannie Farmer brought the school everlasting fame with her cookbook further up Tremont Street in the opposite direction from Hassim views to these two buildings important cultural establishments that anchored the neighborhood on the Left horticultural hall and on the right the studio building horticultural Hall was the second home of the Massachusetts horticultural society it stood at one Tremonti opposite the burying ground it was built in 1865 a white granite and what you can see is an extremely exuberant Italianate style with ample space for displays and public programs in the interior in addition to the columns postures urns on the facade it was ornamented with three monumental figures made by local sculptor Martin mill more showing series flora and Pomona across Bromfield Street here the studio building was described in one guidebook as a perfect hive of artists many of the city's best-known artists had studios there and Wow and they didn't only work there but they also held public receptions and exhibitions either in their own studios or in the building's larger space Austin Hall and it was the artistic heart of the city a lot of the new buildings along this row had public performance spaces and it really brought a lot of people to the neighborhood continuing down the block we see st. Paul's it's severe Greek Revival facade completed in 1820 and today the only building that survives now embellished with a nautilus shell in its pediment reflecting perhaps its status as the only structure that has kept living within itself next door to st. Paul's and here's st. Paul's again you see this weird semi gothic confection a castle ated Twin Towers structure designed by architect Isiah Rogers to house the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts but the Masons moved out in 1857 and sold this building to the US government for use as a United States courthouse a function it served until 1885 for the year of haslums painting when it was leased are Aitch Stern's and company and became a department store the Masons moved up the street to the corner of Tremont and Boylston and took over a few floors of the Winthrop House Hotel which you see here on your left built in 1850 and again towering over the row houses that you can just see a little hint of here but in 1864 the Winthrop house was entirely gutted by fire which you see here on the right and the Masons were forced to rebuild this time building a purpose-built supposedly fireproof granite structure a seven story gothic confection anchoring the corner of Boylston and trauma and this is it the Grand Lodge some of you might know that the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts still is on the corner of Boylston and Tremonti but not in this building any longer this one was punctuated with elegant arches and a slender tower at the top that rock rose to 120 feet it was described as one of the finest specimens of Gothic architecture in the country and it was designed by architect merrill wheel walk and dedicated with the participation of President Andrew Johnson in June 1867 the building in somewhat abbreviated form anchors the end of haslums view of Tremont Street and we can just barely make it out at the end of the block and here it's light sparkling through the scrim of trees we can see yet another architectural innovation the hotel Pelham on Boylston kitty-corner across the street from the Masons a large six story free stone structure built in 1857 and astonishingly moved while occupied 14 feet to the west when Tremont Street south of the common was widened in 1869 the Pelham occasioned that great engineering feat of the age but it also represented an entirely new way of living designed by architect Arthur stone who was at the time working for the firm of Arthur Gilman the hotel Pelham was the city's first purpose-built apartment building and it was probably the first apartment building in the United States as you can see and as one writer had already put it by 1869 Tremont's streets and I quote quiet and beautiful homes are fast giving way block by block to the March of improvement and with the horse cars in front and the numerous stores that are now being established here almost from month-to-month this hitherto sedate and handsome neighborhood is rapidly being converted into what in a few years at farthest must prove to be one of the busiest and noisiest thoroughfares in the heart of the city this in grave view of part of Tremont Street that you see at the top shows a variety of businesses from sewing machine companies to dental supply companies to ice cream parlors and piano stores and there were schools - most notably the Boston Conservatory which you see in the stereo card at the bottom right in the center of the block well why was this transformation so quick to take place for one thing the city was expanding and there were new neighborhoods where everyone wanted to live this is Commonwealth Avenue under construction construction of the Back Bay began in the fall of 1859 and by 1882 the project had been completed as far west as Charles gate the effect on the older parts of the city was considerable as many residents fled the increasing commercial development downtown and moved to the new houses of the Back Bay some built to order for wealthy clients and others built on speculation as you can see in this piecemeal manner evident in the photograph according to William Dean houses aspirational businessman Silas Lapham the main character in his 1885 cautionary novel called the rise of Silas Lapham a home on the water side of Beacon Street had become the ultimate sign of social success that sounds familiar I think well the other thing that happened that hastened the shift away from the historic center of Boston happened in November 1872 when the landfill of the Back Bay was only as far as Exeter Street at that time 1872 sorry the city's business district was devastated by flame a 15-hour fire that destroyed over 700 buildings and devastated 65 acres you see the ruins at the upper left and a map at the right the pink shaded area is the area that burned and here is tremon Street just almost two blocks from the real damage businesses were quick to expand and rebuild but they also took over areas that had once been residential including parcels on Tremont Street what else does have some show us that tells us this is a modern scene well his street is lined with horse cars traffic has come to a complete halt in this view with one car stopped directly behind the other horse-drawn omnibus had arrived on Tremont in 1835 contributing to the demise of the neighborhood as a residential haven for with those regular routes came traffic noise and also as one historian has put it a rich equine flavor and swarms of flies the cacophony was both aural and visual because these carriages soon became rolling advertisements both inside and out you can see if you ride the T nothing has changed by 1853 the city had started to rely rails down in the streets to improve the more irregular path of the horse-drawn carriages the rails allowed horses to pull greater weights more smoothly that improved speeds and the tracks were expanded in a long trim on Street in 1873 the congestion along Tremont Street where the cars were slated to run every eight minutes was the worst in the city and local wags who seemed to have been the same then as they are now said it would be faster to walk on the roofs of these cars than to actually be a passenger riding inside them and if you take the Green Line you'll be sympathetic this is Tremont's Street again a little bit later now with the cars electrified and here the headline from The Boston Globe from September 1st 1897 in an effort to improve service and to avoid the expense of maintaining horses which of course needed to be fed and housed electrified cars began to take the place of horses in 1889 but the bottlenecks continued for almost a decade until the 1897 completion of the first subway line in the United States which ran directly underneath possums view we see something else new some picture the electrification of the city it had first been illuminated with oil lamps but it had had gas lamps for years the first public gas lamp had been lit with great ceremony in 1829 as night fell the lights became increasingly bright transforming Boston's streets from an obstacle course to an easily navigable thoroughfare their brightness offered a perception of safety both from the uneven pavement and also from any lurking strangers who were bent on mischief streetlights marked secure neighborhoods places where brightness inhibited evil deeds or in Ralph Waldo Emerson's words Gaslight is found to be the best nocturnal police but what has some shows is something that's even more modern what he shows are electric arc lights recognizable by their cone-shaped reflectors and distinctly tall light poles which both increase the area of illumination provided and removed this achingly intense blinding source of light from the pedestrians field of vision they produced a much brighter whiter light than the warmer glow of gas and public opinion really began to favor the expanded use of electricity as soon as it became available encouraged by popular local demonstrations of the new technology events that included things like the first nighttime baseball game sponsored by the northern electric light company and played under arc lights at Nantasket Beach in September 1880 proposals were still soon underway to build new Edison plants that could supply electricity and tremon Street was in the vanguard in the 1880s as you can see from the arc lights visible here one contemporary newspaper reported about these electric streetlights anyone who came out of one of the gas lit side streets felt as though he were stepping unexpectedly out of a half dark passage into a room filled with daylight here even at dusk in a Boston winter a well-dressed woman could tarry with children and what about these women well they are fashionable to be sure wearing appropriate garments for walking such as the ones you see here on the left in a Frank Juvonen Court retrim the 1880s of his wife Lizzie boot dooba neck and the center of fashion plate from Harper's Bazaar on the right painting by the Belgian artist north of a little girl from 1885 wearing one of those nice coats women of the period though were strongly discouraged from dressing to attract notice when on a public street showy costumes and brilliant colors said one etiquette manual we're considered inappropriate I could never go out in this there were two likely to solicit attention and draw unwanted responses from men instead quiet colors like the brown tones of hassles woman's dress were recommended in 1878 etiquette manual devoted a whole chapter to conduct in the street offering advice for ladies walking or taking public transportation while reminding them and warning them of the performative nature of these activities and I quote a lady's conduct is never so entirely at the mercy of critics because never so public as when she is in the street her dress her carriage her walk will all be exposed to notice every passerby will look at her if it is only for a glance every unladylike action will be marked and no position will a dignified ladylike deportment be more certain to command respect one rule you must lay down with regard to a walking dress it must never be conspicuous in a way Hass amuses the woman and these children to tame his urban scene it gives it a sentimental cast it domesticates it and feminized is it and really turns this very modern public setting into something more comfortable the street lights and well-lit shops help make this commercial neighborhood an acceptable place for women to walk freely but it wasn't just technology that it shifted the city's urban dynamic women were changing too and let me show you one of my favorite portraits of a woman from 1885 lnj Hales self-portrait Boston like the Bostonian Ellen day Hale for example was particularly famous for its female reformers and activists so famous in fact that they were satirized in fiction for their intellect their single-minded dedication and their public efforts to transform various causes they provided James with the subject for his novel the Bostonians published in century magazine first in 1885 just one Hassim began his ambitious picture boston women met with remarkable success in health care welfare education politics sports dress reform historic preservation conservation in the arts but a numb among their accomplishments was a very notable public shift the ease and comfort with which an unaccompanied woman of good character could navigate the city of Boston the freedom to travel around as etiquette at Florence how put it to go about where and in whatever way we please was praised as a hallmark of American society that differentiated it from Europe how said how great would be the surprise of a foreigner of distinction if he should happen to catch a glimpse of the interior of a Boston horse car in the evening if you should tell him that those groups of ladies without any attendant Cavalier belong to Boston's best and that the friendly horse car would carry them safe and unmolested almost to their very doors he would scarcely believe the testimony well while rules of behavior needed to be observed how added thanks to the Puritans and the horse cars women in dear old Boston had considerable latitude well opposite the physical and social developments that has some showed the unchanging common opens up at right the common then as now was a place of respite and play and it offered a number of amusements even in winter coasting on the common was a spectator sport as you can see at the top and a magazine illustration and you could buy things to eat from characters like Apple Mary so famous and so long lived that she became the subject of a number of stereo cards and it boasted illuminated pathways that Hassim carefully studied at around the same time in this picture from the Florence Griswold Museum in Connecticut balancing the glow of lights and the geometry of the pedestrian walkways with the glitter of newfound snow it's very unlike for example the work of Jean Bevo the French painter of city scenes with whom Hassim in his own day was most often compared and I'm showing you boroughs Sunday at the Church of Sam Philippe Paris from 1877 now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum Hassim view unlike this one maintains a connection to nature ha soms muted palette with its harmonies of rust and brown recalls the pensive sunsets of his artistic colleagues the tonalist that late 19th century alternative to the high keyed colors of the Impressionists and among haslums early heroes was this painter George fuller whose afterglow from 1884 in the Phillips Collection I'm showing you here fuller inspired a poetic approach to depicting the landscape in keeping with the region's devotion to the writings of Thoreau and Emerson and the galleries and exhibition halls were full of paintings of sunsets and Dusk's and Hassim borrowed this introspective mood of the pastoral twilight transferring its rusty glow into the russet brick buildings of the city losing nothing of their delicate harmonies of color but doing something now distinctly different avoiding a rural scene to create an urban meditation one that looked not only to the past but also to the future well what happened to Hassim and his painting after he finished it in 1886 he exhibited an in Boston and in New York and in Louisville Kentucky and while it garnered critical attention it never found a buyer in 1887 hassles held a solo exhibition in Boston with the intention of selling absolutely everything in his studio to support the cost of his trip with his wife to settle in Paris and his view of Tremont's tree which he entitled at dusk was apparently sold to someone named Daniel's which we know only because this catalog that you see from on the left in our library is annotated Hassim left for France and began to turn his attention to a new city as you can see in our own Grand Prix des from 1887 on the right now painting it with a much brighter palette and the flickering brushstrokes of Impressionism but still his themes in Paris that you see two of here were remarkably similar to the themes he had painted in Boston wet pavements trolley cars and the life of the city when Hassim returned to the United States and to Boston he continued to render the urban scene Boston on the left in our own Charles River and Beacon Hill from the early 1890s and on the right a view of Washington Square in New York he kept making Orban scenes when he moved to New York in 1889 aligning himself with the impressionist movement setting himself up really as an alternative for American collectors who wanted something more patriotic but still an impressionist scene but Hassim also always maintained his interest in the colonial past and for all of his city scenes he made just as many images of colonial buildings in and around New England like these two the on the left the colonial church at Old Lyme and on the right Trinity Church in Newport at Appledore on the Isles of Shoals he produced watercolors and oils that are arguably the finest works of his career and I'm showing you Hassim on the left on the porch of a hotel and Appledore and it write one of these watercolors he became the most accomplished American practitioners of the impressionist style he always maintained his fascination with urban views now in New York often showing them in snow or wet weather like the late afternoon winter view from the Brooklyn Museum you see on the left but he also became intrigued with the new vantage points that New York's tall buildings provided like one on the right of Union Square in the spring in 1896 now in the collection of Smith College his interest here and surface pattern and geometry and in new vantage points is interesting because those topics have become so identified with modern art something that has them came to despise he was reinvigorated as a painter by the patriotic displays in New York at the end at the beginning of World War one and where he completely domesticated the French impressionist style and turned it into an American one here for example in Allies Day May 1917 from the collection of the National Gallery this could only be New York with its buildings and its flags and what then became up at dusk Boston Common and Twilight well we know that the insurance man Samuel Appleton owned it by about 1893 his daughter remembered that her father had had it hanging in his office for a while before he had a house large enough to accommodate it Appleton as you can see here in his obituary from the New York Times had been left unemployed and panelists at 40 after the 1872 fire completely wiped out his building and his business but eventually Appleton prospered from the event becoming a leading provider of a new kind of insurance employers a liability insurance and he made a fortune at it and in fact the building on your right which was built just at the time Appleton had died is the cent is the Appleton building it's on Kilby street in the financial district and it's named after this samuel Appleton he left the painting to his daughter Maude who immediately lent it and soon gave it in 1931 to the MFA Hassim died in 1935 and his reputation fell a victim both to changes in taste and perhaps also to his public irritability of his late career American Impressionism was dismissed altogether by leading art historians it was described as derivative a backwater a footnote for example in a 1959 textbook by John kanaday and in the 1970s when the study of American art really was barely in its infancy and when the MFA had no curator of American paintings this painting was lent to adorn the office of Mayor Kevin white where it served as a trophy illustration of the city perhaps it's peaceful vision a sort of political statement for the mayor a sense of harmony and calm in an era of political and racial turbulence and I just found this photograph of Kevin white and Queen Elizabeth in 1976 with our painting behind them now in our galleries Hassim picture has become one of the MFA's most iconic works it's a popular favorite and I'm told the best-selling postcard in the shop Qasim's Boston common at Twilight is perhaps his masterpiece wrote John Updike in 2004 certainly it's one of the most loved paintings in the collection of the Boston Museum Updike described the painting in literary terms reading it and bringing to it his novelists perspective and I quote divided exactly in half like an open book it crowds on to its left-hand page the tall buildings and seething traffic of Tremont's Street and the pedestrians treading a path worn in the snow at Commons edge the right-half holds only a few small birds a tapering row of benches and another of Elms and a snow-covered expanse in the West an orange glow through the trees signals the passing of sunset City gloaming the suspenseful moment as darkness descends and life moves toward the lamps of home becomes elegiac the tender foreground trio a mother and her two children feeding the park sparrows is rendered with a slightly awkward formality that hasn't brought to the human figure and they are saved front buy it from sentimentality and over animation the viewer has no doubt that the subject of the painting is the dying orange light that tinges this frozen but in habited urban extent uptight concluded that hassles best works quote take fire from a similar snow shrouded moment in which we feel nature infiltrating and overshadowing a metropolis whose lights nevertheless continue to burn well these lights kept burning but Hassim Tremont Street didn't last very long one building replaced another in a continual state of metamorphosis although it will be clear from any recent stroll down the block and this is mine on a recent snowy day very recent that a butterfly really never emerged out of this chrysalis not one of the buildings that has him depicted remains even some of the newest structures that he showed were replaced in the 1890s and early 1900s and since then they too have been replaced by even newer construction like millennium play which took over where the ovens house hotel used to be today luxury condominiums have brought well-to-do residents back to Tremont Street to the site of colonnade row but at the same time people still are hurrying along Tremont Street and sauntering down its promenade and when a reddish Sun sets early on a December afternoon Haslam's picture remains in our minds I the traffic still lines the street the lamps still begin to glow the trees still turn into silhouettes bundled pedestrians still walk along the edge of the common and in that way house painting really brings together past and present we can feel it's cold and damp hear the sounds of its afternoon rush see the juxtaposition of its built environment and its open space and even though that magic might last just for a minute in that second the art suspends time thank you [Applause] I do have time for questions if anybody has them and jasmine and I can't see who's over there Lauren have microphones if you don't mind waiting for one that would be helpful for everybody else question is did Hassim and Sergeant know each other the answer is they probably met they weren't really working in the same kind of environment Hassim is mostly a landscape painter Hahn Sargent of course working with the city's social networks in his portrait painting Hassim doesn't go to Europe as much either so they don't cross paths in the same way that Sargent does with a number of other American artists Erika how could this fascinating historically contextual presentation that you've given and are more into the visitor experience in a gallery oh great question David of course you would ask it how can we bring this experience into the gallery it's something we're really trying to do now and the answer is we can do some of it in the form of our multimedia guide we can do some of it in the form of gallery talks and presentations we can do some of it by maybe making something like this more available as you're standing in the gallery in some way whether electronic or in print it's a question we struggle with because really what our visitor wants is for me to be standing there and the answer to that might be a hologram I just want to know where this picture is in the museum okay the question where is this picture it's on level two of the American wing if you go through the main doors walk through the Sargent gallery and into the gallery called the salon where everything is hanging to the ceiling and turn to your right you will see it it's right on the doorway in the American Impressionists gallery learn can you pass the microphone to the center thank you I was so happy to hear you talk about the light because I know that this I was never sure if this was electric or gas light do you think in the building's itself they were also electric light I don't know the answer to that they certainly could have had electric light at this point whether they did or not I don't know it's such a rapidly expanding technology you'd really have to look into the individual architectural history of these buildings and see whether they were on the grid the grid that was being established then or not they certainly had the potential to have electric light thank you [Music] thank you very much it's always one of my favorite pictures and just have this knowledge is wonderful thank you if you could just talk a little bit more about his personal life which I would find very interesting maybe other people thank you question was a little more about haslums personal life Hassim doesn't tell us a lot about his personal life to be honest with you he was married to Catherine for the remainder of their lives she shows up as a model in a lot of his later pictures he became very involved with the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York he was certainly a senior member of American Impressionist circles in New York he became quite conservative later in his life and very vociferous about the perils of immigration and other causes that he felt were disruptive but in terms of his actual personality and personal life we don't have a lot of information I wish I could answer that question can you tell us a little bit about the effects of Landfill on the social life of Boston at this time a lot of people I know are astonished when they learn that Boston today is almost three-quarters landfill and this picture was painted obviously at the beginning of the massive adoption of landfill in the Back Bay and that great photo you had of Commonwealth Avenue really speaks to what was going on when this was being painted well it's a complete and utter transformation of Boston and people are always shocked when they see the original shamah Peninsula which is so small and they realize that Washington Street is just what ran along the neck that connected Boston to the mainland and it was filled out in so many different stages either side of Washington Street built out to be wider and wider and then the whole filling of the Back Bay which included portions of what we now call the South End the build-out around the harbor getting bigger and bigger I've often thought it would be a fantastic contemporary art public project to somehow draw the original shoreline of Boston through the city streets I always I always wanted to write to Christo and tell him to come get a big ribbon of blue and put it around the original shoreline I think people would be shocked by it so it has a huge effect as different populations move to these newer neighborhoods Beacon Hill is relatively stable we all know that but the great residential neighborhoods of Tremont Street of the crescent of buildings that were near government center these magnificent row houses a lot of them designed by Bulfinch they all went with the mercantile development of Boston which then the people who used to live in them move to the Back Bay if the houses didn't go than those residences were taken over by new population groups the Irish the Italians the Jewish immigrants who came during the 19th century suggest in in waves of people and as you can see on the handout I gave you Boston's population practically doubles throughout the nineteenth century it's an enormous transformation in the city both politically in terms of the diversity of the population the kinds of jobs that are available the construction jobs that this filling in required and some of the books on the bibliography that I suggested about the building of Boston can give you more information about how all that took place it was something that we would argue about for a blue moon would never happen now I have feeling but if you think about Arlington Street being water you realize how much was actually done in a short amount of time in the mid nineteenth century okay right in the middle I'm sure we don't know where the who the woman is or her children but where would they possibly be living to be you know in this situation would they be living in Beacon Hill or is there some other residential neighborhood right behind a very good question we don't know who the woman is haslums wife mom could have modeled for her she models for a lot of figures in haslums work especially at this point she could have been a professional model he could have just made sketches on the street and then gone home and made her up we don't really even know whether she's a mother with children she could be a governess for example and if she were a resident of the area she could indeed be living on Beacon Hill she could be living in a residential apartment like the Pelham where a lot of women did live she could also live anywhere because she could get on one of those streetcars and go back to Brookline or wherever she happened to come from the Back Bay so it's what what I find interesting here is the mobility that women had in the city the the freedom to move around on their own under their own steam I didn't I talk about this in the book I didn't talk about it today but there were also a lot of attractions for women in this neighborhood a lot of shops she could be a shop girl who's picked up her children after work she could be going to the Boston Women's Club which was further up on Tremont Street so there are lots of possibilities and I like that it's left a little open for speculation I think maybe one more question and then I'm gonna scurry off to the book shop where I hope all of you will buy this extremely reasonably priced volume and it's a great gift for dads and grads anyone well thank you all very much for coming we'll see you in the lobby [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 3,810

Keywords: childe hassam, painting, american painting, art, art history, american impressionism, boston common, lecture, course

Id: LOD49N0zsw0

Length: 71min 22sec (4282 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2016