At the Florist

Oil on canvas painting depicting women at a florist. In the foreground to the right, a woman with a black hat decorated with red flowers selects flowers for a bouquet. A woman in apron beside her holds the selections. The bouquets are all wrapped in white paper.		Frederick Childe Hassam
American (1859-1935)
At the Florist, 1889
Oil on canvas
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. This work of art is dedicated by the Museum Trustees to Linda Kaufman in gratitude for the time, talent, and resources she has so generously given to the Chrysler. June 1999.
American Art
Location:  Exhibit, Gallery 274
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Dimensions:  H: 36 5/8 in, W: 54 1/8 in
Object ID: 71.500

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Frederick Childe Hassam
Dorchester, Mass. 1859-1935 East Hampton, N.Y.
At the Florist (Chez la Fleuriste), 1889
Oil on canvas, 36 5/8 × 54 1/8 in. (93 × 137.5 cm)
Signed lower right: CHILDE HASSAM. Paris
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.500
Dedicated by the Museum Trustees to Linda Kaufman in gratitude for the time, talent, and resources she has so generously given to the Chrysler, June 1999

References: Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, p. 221; H. Barbara Weinberg et al., American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915, exhib. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York et al., 1994-95, pp. 14-16, 179, 188, 366, no. 32; Warren Adelson, Jay E. Canton, and William H. Gerdts, Childe Hassam Impressionist, New York, 1999, p. 29; H. Barbara Weinberg et al., Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, exhib. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2004, pp. 75-76, 407, no. 8.

Painters in the United States turned to Impressionism somewhat belatedly, more than a decade after it had come to the fore in France. Indeed, Impressionism achieved widespread popular success in the United States only after 1893, when a display of American Impressionist paintings at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago received an enthusiastic reception from the critics and public alike. The movement gained additional focus and momentum in 1897, when a small group of ­painters-among them America's leading Impressionists-resigned from the Society of American Artists in New York to form an independent exhibition alliance. The group, which came to be known as The Ten American Painters (see objects 97.11, 59.79.1, 71.847, 46.76.159, 71.713, 71.618, 71.2153), showed their works annually for the next twenty years. The most prominent and productive member of the original Ten-and also its most fully Impressionist artist-was Childe Hassam.
The son of a prominent hardware merchant, Hassam initially studied wood engraving in Boston, where he soon won acclaim as a book illustrator and watercolorist. After his first visit to Europe in 1883-he would make four such trips during his life-he turned decisively to oil painting, producing Boston street scenes in a tonal realist style.
Hassam began to adopt Impressionism while in Paris in 1886-89, his second visit abroad. There he viewed the last of the Impressionists' group exhibitions (1886) and responded warmly to the brilliant palette and free, form-dissolving brush techniques of Claude Monet and his colleagues. He returned to America and established himself in New York, where, in the 1890s, he reached his creative zenith in a series of vigorously painted landscapes, sun-filled garden and interior scenes, and New York street views. His famous Flag paintings, created during World War I, sustained his reputation well into the twentieth century.
Painted in Paris in 1889, At the Florist presents a charming slice of French urban life: a curbside flower market filled with bouquets and ministered by young female attendants dressed in white work aprons and caps. Though Hassam's French contemporaries-one thinks particularly of Louis Marie de Schryver-often painted pictures of Parisian flower stalls, they typically portrayed them within the broader mise en scèneof surrounding shops and boulevards. Hassam, however, dispenses with urban context here, creating a distinctive, shallow, stagelike setting that focuses exclusively on the market and the subtle social interplay between the vendors and the fashionably dressed lady who surveys their wares.
Hassam evokes the flowers in a colorful blur of summary strokes typical of his nascent Impressionist manner, while in the figures and pavement he retains the precision of his earlier, more traditional realist style. As Barbara Weinberg has noted, he may have tempered his Impressionist manner to make the painting more competitive at the traditional exhibition venue of the Salon. In any event, before he left Paris in mid-1889, he arranged for the picture to be shown at the 1890 Salon.
Hassam comments subtly on the beauty of women and flowers, comparing the freshness and brilliance of the spring bouquets to the natural beauty of the young women who sell them. Consider, for example, the girl who stands in profile at right, patiently waiting on her customer. The shape and hue of her apron are echoed in the white paper cones encircling the bouquets and flowering plants. The significance of the analogy could not be more obvious: the girl herself is a living, breathing bouquet, her flawless face merely the crowning blossom in the armful of flowers she holds.
After showing the painting at the 1890 Salon, Hassam exhibited it one year later in Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where it was purchased by Dr. George Sands of Philadelphia.
JCH
 

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