Childe Hassam's impressions of eastern Oregon

When Childe Hassam visited Oregon a century ago, he was the most famous painter in the United States. The American-born, French-educated impressionist had made his career producing cityscapes of New York and Boston and more idyllic landscapes of Maine and Cape Cod, all in the shimmering style of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. Hassam's work - especially his prolific output of American flag paintings - proved so popular that he died wealthy.

When he came to Oregon in 1904 and again in 1908, he arrived as a high-profile ambassador of traditional European culture to the pioneer West, lending credibility to the struggling cultural institutions here on the fringe of civilization. Hassam was brought West by his friend Charles Erskine Scott Wood, a remarkable character in Oregon history. A reluctant West Point graduate, an Indian fighter who witnessed Chief Joseph's surrender, a lawyer, poet, raconteur and painter, Wood was a founding trustee of the Portland Art Museum.

He did his best to promote American art here at a time when the few serious collectors in Oregon looked almost entirely to France for acquisitions. Wood lured Hassam, whom he had known since the 1890s, to Oregon by offering a commission to paint murals for the library of Wood's Portland mansion. The result was not only the murals, most of which survive (though the mansion does not), but an entire series of paintings of the Oregon landscape by an American master.

Dipping into public and private collections, Portland Art Museum curator Margaret Bullock has brought much of this work together for the first time in the exhibit "Childe Hassam: Impressionist in the West,'' now on display at the museum.

Hassam loved Oregon and its frontier desert. A 1908 photograph reproduced in this exhibit shows him, bare-chested and barrel-chested, painting away at an easel propped up in the desert sage; next to him is Wood at his own easel. Hassam in some ways had too good a time here; Wood complained the Easterner spent too much time fishing and drinking and too little time painting during his visits West. Despite his diversions, Hassam created at least 60 and perhaps as many as 100 works while he was here, from landscapes to portraits, in both oil and watercolor. In 1910, Hassam exhibited eight of the Oregon works among 38 pieces he entered in the Carnegie International show in Pittsburgh.

Many of Hassam's Oregon works are now lost or, as Bullock notes in the exhibition catalog, ``exist merely as shadows: unlocated, secreted in private collections or referred to in passing in a faded newspaper article or letter.''

This is a small but rewarding show, with only 31 pieces, including five paintings by Wood and eight works from Hassam's other periods. The best thing here is Hassam's paintings of the Eastern Oregon desert, which shimmer with the meeting of the artist's familiar impressionist style and the original high-desert landscape of Harney County. The big desert sky, especially, seemed to entrance the artist, and most of his paintings are more sky than anything else.

Hassam's 1908 painting titled ``Afternoon Sky, Harney Desert'' was the first painting acquired by the Portland Art Museum for its permanent collection and is regularly on display at the museum. It is joined for this show, though, by paintings you would normally have to travel thousands of miles to see. ``Golden Afternoon,'' also from 1908, shows a stand of cottonwood trees with the notched ridgetop of Steens Mountain in the background; it is owned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Besides the Oregon desert paintings, the exhibit includes paintings of Portland, Mount Hood, the Oregon Coast and the Oregon Trail.

Jan. 30, 2005