Hassam was a prominent and prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and the museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs in his career, and was a founding member of The Ten, an influential group of American artists of the early 20th century. His most famous works are the Flag paintings, completed during World War I.
A disastrous fire in November 1872 wiped out much of Boston's commercial district including his father's business. To help out the family, Hassam dropped out of high school and his father lined up a job for him in the accounting department of publisher Little Brown & Company. His poor aptitude for figures, however, convinced his father to allow him to pursue an art career. Hassam found employment with George Johnson, a wood engraver. He quickly proved an adept draftsman and he produced designs for commercial engravings, such as images for letterheads and newspapers. Around 1879, Hassam began creating his earliest oil paintings but his preferred medium was watercolors, mostly outdoor studies.
In 1882, Hassam became a free-lance illustrator, (known as a black-and-white man in the trade), and established his first studio. He specialized in illustrating children's stories for magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Scribner's Monthly magazine, and The Century. He continued to develop his technique while attended drawing classes at the Lowell Institute, a division of MIT, and at the Boston Art Club, where he took life painting classes.
By 1882, Hassam was exhibiting publicly and had his first solo exhibition, of watercolors, at the Williams and Everett Gallery in BostonBy the mid-1880s, Hassam began painting cityscapes in nearby locales, his Boston Common at Twilight (1885) being one of his first. Hassam took classes in figure drawing and painting at the Academie Julian. Although he took advantage of the formal drawing classes with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre, he quickly moved on to his own self-study, finding that The Julian academy is the personification of routine...[academic training] crushes all originality out of growing men. It tends to put them in a rut and it keeps them in it, preferring instead, my own method in the same degree. His first Parisian works were street scenes, employing a mostly brown palette, and he sent these works back to Boston for sale, which combined with older watercolors provided the couple with sufficient income to sustain their stay abroad.
In 1919, Hassam purchased a home in East Hampton, New York. Many of his late paintings employed nearby subjects in that town and on Long Island. The post-war art market boomed in the 1920s, and Hassam commanded escalating prices, though some critics thought he had become static and repetitive, as American art had begun to move on to the Realism of the Ashcan School and artists like Edward Hopper and Robert Henri. In 1920, he received the Gold Medal of Honor for lifetime achievement from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and numerous other awards through the 1920's. Hassam traveled relatively little in his last years, but did visit California, Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico. He died in East Hampton in 1935, at age 75.
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