The Water Garden

By 1909 Childe Hassam had been painting in the Impressionist manner for two decades, and his touch was starting to change. He made this on the grounds of a friend's place in East Hampton, at the eastern end of Long Island, where a shallow lily pond lay fringed with irises. In place of the flickering, broken brushwork of his earlier city scenes, the flowers and water here are laid on in flat, woven patches, so the pond reads almost like a tapestry pressed up against the surface. It is the more decorative, flattened look he had taken from the Post-Impressionists working in Europe. Hassam liked that stretch of the island enough that he later bought his own house nearby, and spent much of the last 16 years of his life out there.