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Lot Essay
During the early 1900s, Childe Hassam and his wife Maude began to make frequent visits to stay with friends Harry and Gwendolyn Pomroy who were residents of Wainscott, Long Island. The picturesque views and the daily life of Long Island inspired Hassam to create many wonderful paintings of coastal scenes and village life. Eventually, in 1919, Hassam and his wife purchased an eighteenth-century shingled house on Egypt Lane in East Hampton which they warmly referred to as Willow Bend. Hassam worked at Willow Bend every summer from mid-May to early November until 1934.
The Audition, East Hampton depicts female figures reading scripts in Hassam's garden in East Hampton, while a horse and rider canter by in the distance. Hassam devoted many paintings to the theme of leisure and often featured young women in repose or social activity. In his later works like The Audition, East Hampton, Hassam experimented with texture and color in a new way. Donelson Hoopes remarks, "The brilliant surface manipulation of pigment that is the prominent characteristic of the Flag Series paintings of 1916 to 1918 was an intermediate step to Hassam's late stylistic development away from realism toward a much more decorative use of color than he had ever before employed...Hassam's postwar landscape paintings partake of this new-found freedom to experiment with color. Unlike his earlier works, these pictures do not seek to approximate light of nature in an 'optically correct' way. Often his palette was set in an extremely high tonal key. In this arbitrary disregard for naturalism, Hassam displayed a pronounced attachment to color for its own sake, which when combined with the broad, mannered brushwork, renders the painting an object in its own right more than a picture of something in nature." (Childe Hassam, New York, 1988, p. 84)
We would like to thank the Hassam catalogue raisonné committee for their assistance with cataloguing this work.
This painting will be included in Stuart P. Feld's and Kathleen M. Burnside's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.
The Audition, East Hampton depicts female figures reading scripts in Hassam's garden in East Hampton, while a horse and rider canter by in the distance. Hassam devoted many paintings to the theme of leisure and often featured young women in repose or social activity. In his later works like The Audition, East Hampton, Hassam experimented with texture and color in a new way. Donelson Hoopes remarks, "The brilliant surface manipulation of pigment that is the prominent characteristic of the Flag Series paintings of 1916 to 1918 was an intermediate step to Hassam's late stylistic development away from realism toward a much more decorative use of color than he had ever before employed...Hassam's postwar landscape paintings partake of this new-found freedom to experiment with color. Unlike his earlier works, these pictures do not seek to approximate light of nature in an 'optically correct' way. Often his palette was set in an extremely high tonal key. In this arbitrary disregard for naturalism, Hassam displayed a pronounced attachment to color for its own sake, which when combined with the broad, mannered brushwork, renders the painting an object in its own right more than a picture of something in nature." (Childe Hassam, New York, 1988, p. 84)
We would like to thank the Hassam catalogue raisonné committee for their assistance with cataloguing this work.
This painting will be included in Stuart P. Feld's and Kathleen M. Burnside's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.