Impression oil painting

Impression oil painting
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In his later years, the American Impression oil painting painter Childe Hassam (1859-1935) grew increasingly disgruntled. As the vogue for Impressionism petered out, his career began to wane and he became exasperated with the influence and impact of “Ellis Island art,” as he and his supporters rudely branded Modernism.

To some extent, he retreated to Long Island; he began visiting East Hampton, then a sleepy village, in 1898. For the next few decades he captured the local landscape in paintings and prints. Though not representing the pinnacle of his achievement, they are nonetheless lovely to look at.

Around 50 of these works have been assembled at the Long Island Museum for “Childe Hassam: An American Impression oil painting on Long Island,” organized by the museum’s curator, Eva Greguski. It is a pleasing if lightweight exhibition, knee-deep in pretty pictures of gardens and old houses, meadows and beaches, and the occasional nude oil painting.

The show is arranged partly chronologically, partly by theme, beginning with a selection of artworks, mostly etchings, documenting local architecture. There are pictures of windmills, farm sheds, houses and shipyards, along with prints showing East Hampton’s wide, tree-lined Main Street, which was among Hassam’s favorite themes.

The East Hampton Elms in May” (1925), one of the more beautiful works here, depicts horses and carts ambling up and down the unpaved street, which is overhung with leafy trees and all but deserted. This is a celebration of natural beauty, affluence and ease of life in a small American town.

Also popular are pictures of antique cottages with crooked shingles, weathered brick or board walls and handmade oil paintings door latches set within verdant gardens, suggesting hardy, simple domesticity in a natural setting. “Old Doorway, East Hampton” (1920), on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shows vines framing the doorway of an old weatherboard house. It is perfectly charming, and incredibly nostalgic.

Interestingly, the exhibition wall text alludes to a possible ideological context for Hassam’s celebration of Colonial architecture and small-town living. By portrait painting that it and other towns like it wereportrait oil painting East Hampton as idyllic, the text says, he was “assertin bastions of an admirable culture and traditional American values.” Certainly, this view is in accord with his disdain for “Ellis Island art” and those associated with it.