Childe Hassam : “Peach Blossoms-Villiers-le-Bel” (1887-1889)

Childe Hassam’s transition to Impressionism took place during his sojourn to Paris from 1887 to 1889, where he had intended to study at the Académie Julian. Finding it “the personification of routine,” and academic training a rut that “crushes all originality out of growing men,” he quickly moved on to self-study, encountering the works of the Impressionists and adapting their style to his own.

During his summers he visited the country retreat of Ernest Blumenthal at Villiers-le-Bel in the Oise River Valley, about ten miles northeast of Paris, where Thomas Couture had lived and painted. His canvases of its well-manicured garden anticipate his later work at the Isles of Shoals, where he became enamored of the poet Celia Thaxter’s island garden. Peach Blossoms — Villiers-le-Bel is a clever departure from these, depicting an overgrown peach tree situated outside the confines of the carefully-tended estate.

“Here,” observes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Hassam celebrated the beauty of cultivated nature now gone wild, playing off the bent Y-shaped trunk against the tangled veil of blooming branches that surmounts it. The unruly teach tree is delectably dynamic, especially in contrast to the controlled nature that usually preoccupied Hassam at Villiers-le-Bel.”

Hassam’s choice of subject may have been inspired by his interest in Japanese art, then in vogue among the French avant-garde. The asymmetrical, white-blossoming tree recalls Hiroshige’s Plum Park in Kameido, which was copied by Vincent van Gogh in 1887.