The Lion Gardiner House, East Hampton

Renowned for his colorful paintings, watercolors, and pastels, Childe Hassam was also a talented artist in black and white, as The Lion Gardiner House, East Hampton demonstrates. The artist rendered a bold dappled pattern of light and dark on an old white clapboard house with dark shutters flanking its windows and enclosed by a white picket fence. Hassam's strokes and loosely scribbled lines translate the shadows cast by three tall, stately elms into meandering striations interwoven with bright patches of sunlight evoked by the unprinted areas of the paper. Almost obscured by this complex play of light and dark is the figure of a man approaching the gate.

Between 1889 and 1919, Hassam, who resided in New York City, regularly summered in New England locales. East Hampton, New York, became another favorite seasonal destination after he first visited the idyllic Long Island town in 1898. Its quaint old houses, gardens, tree-lined streets, and nearby meadows and coastal scenery inspired him to create paintings, drawings, and etchings. In August 1919, Hassam purchased an eighteenth-century East Hampton house that became his home for six months of each year for the rest of his life. As a portrait of gracious historic architecture in an idyllic setting, The Lion Gardiner House, East Hampton evinces the artist's fascination with America's early history—a touchstone, in the work of many American artists at the turn of the twentieth century, of beleaguered genteel values in an increasingly heterogeneous and urbanized America.

The Lion Gardiner House, East Hampton alludes to local history. Built around 1740, the house was named for seventeenth-century English colonist Lion Gardiner, founder of the first English settlement in what became the state of New York. A nearby bay and island also bear the Gardiner name; Gardiners Island has been family-owned since Lion Gardiner acquired it in 1639. At the time Hassam portrayed the old house, from direct observation, "Uncle" David Gardiner, a descendent of Lion Gardiner, lived there. The Lion Gardiner House still stands, although it has been moved from its original location and its original appearance has been modified, and it now serves as the home of the Ladies' Village Improvement Society of East Hampton.

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