CHILDE HASSAM The Lion Gardiner House, Easthampton.
Etching, 1920. 250x357 mm; 9 3/4x14 inches, full margins. Signed with the cypher and inscribed "imp." in pencil, lower right. A superb, richly-inked and proof-like impression of this very scarce, important etching, with strong contrasts and selective wiping of the ink on the plate.
Hassam's spent most of his summers outside New York and he first visited East Hampton in 1898, where he would return again and again until moving there and buying a home in 1919. He became a member of the golf course at the The Maidstone Club and took daily swims in the ocean. In the Hamptons, the historic, tree-lined streets would provide him with the vistas of contemporary life that he wanted to capture without nostalgia, drenched in light and shadows. In this etching from 1920, depicting the Lion Gardiner house in Easthampton, the figure in the foreground, Uncle David Gardiner, was a local descendant of Lion Gardiner and the current occupant when Hassam etched him standing amongst the elms in October of that year. Cortissoz/Clayton 159.
