Moonlight by Childe Hassam

has-018I recently visited the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and saw a Childe Hassam exhibition, featuring 40 oil paintings and watercolors from 1880 through 1912. Hassam was a prolific American Impressionist painter who was born in 1859 and died in 1935. You may be most familiar with his flag series painted during World War I. This Hassam exhibition displays the serenity and beauty of the Isles of the Shoals, which are rocky islands in the Gulf of Maine where Hassam spent many years painting. One of the canvases that caught my eye was Moonlight. Moonlight is an oil painting from 1892 that portrays the rocky shores of the Isles of the Shoals with the moonlight reflecting on the water. Hassam’s impasto technique creates an illumination of the light in the sky, which emphasizes the tranquility of the location and the power of light. Hassam’s many brushstrokes surrounding the moon accentuates the viewer’s focus on the upper half of the canvas. As a result of his technique, the painting appears to glow. The viewer notices a small red light on the left side of the painting. The source of this red light is from a lighthouse in the distance, which seems to capture the harbor community of the Isles of the Shoals. For those of you who are interested in learning more about Childe Hassam’s work, you can see his works as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Source: http://pem.org/writable/resources/image/overlay_full/has-018.jpg