Summer Evening

For the next three weeks on Mondays we will be presenting masterpieces from Florence Griswold Museum centered on the home of Florence Griswold, which was the center of the Old Lyme Art Colony, the main place of development of American Impressionism. Enjoy! :) Childe Hassam created Summer Evening the year he first visited Appledore Island in the Isles of Shoals, a resort off the coast of Maine presided over by gardener and poet Celia Laighton Thaxter. In this painting, possibly completed there, the woman angles her body away into the shadows while the potted plant leans toward the sun. Painting in Cos Cob, Old Lyme, and New York, Hassam would return many times to the theme of a woman near a window contemplating her relationship to the outside world. The same year he completed Summer Evening, Hassam went to Paris to study. There, he absorbed the style of artists such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, though he never had direct contact with any of the French Impressionists. When he returned to the United States he roamed up the east coast visiting different artists’ colonies and enclaves, spreading the Impressionist style.