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©
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Childe Hassam

September Clouds

ca. 1891
Pastel on canvas.
50.8 x 61 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.1999.112
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop

After three years study in Europe, Childe Hassam returned to the United States in the fall of 1889. The following spring he exhibited in the fourth and last exhibition of The Society of Painters in Pastel, which promoted the virtues of a medium that was becoming popular in America. The Society, formed in 1882, held its first exhibition in New York in 1884, a year before the Société des Pastellistes was organised in Paris, and four years before the first exhibition of the London Pastel Society in 1888. Pastel, it was felt, was the perfect medium for capturing the "unsubstantial mood of nature"; it "can seize such evanescent, shy effect, can intimate such inimitable textures, can elaborate such bewitching, rare tonalities, and such aerial or such audacious schemes of color [...]", wrote a reviewer of the Society's first exhibition.

The effusion of nature was a favourite subject for Hassam, and although pastels are a small part of his total oeuvre, the artist used the medium to great success in a number of flowering and arboreal landscapes. The transitory nature of the fugitive blossom of leaf is captured by Hassam in such pastels as Poppies, Isles of Shoals, 1890 (Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Horowitz Collection); Poppies, Isles of Shoals, 1891 (Private collection); Summertime, 1891 (Private collection); as well as in September Clouds. As his early biographer, Adeline Adams, ironically noted: "This most masculine of artists delighted in creating color designs from the most fragile, evanescent elements. He chooses a blossoming fruit tree, the shimmer of birches, a vine, a veil of mist [...]".

September Clouds is one of a number of pastels Hassam made at Lexington, Massachusetts, during September and October in 1891. Lexington, situated eleven miles from Boston with a population of a little over three thousand, was venerated for the role it played in the American Revolutionary War. The area was described by a 19th-century historian as "generally uneven, furnishing a pleasant variety of hill and dale" with "a warm and productive soil, well adapted to grass and fruit trees. "September Clouds was among the nineteen pastels that Hassam exhibited in Boston at Doll and Richards that November, which were almost exclusively of Lexington or neighbouring towns. The pastel was highly praised by the critics. The review in the Boston Daily Advertiser, under the heading, "Mr. Hassam's Work, 'September Clouds', A Good Example", characterised the pastel as "a simple but poetic representation of a pleasing subject", while the critic for the Boston Evening Transcript described it as "a sunny midsummer [sic] landscape, with a fine blue and white sky, and cloud-shadows meandering over the greensward".

Critics also noted that these landscapes exhibited certain eccentricities of the artist. Unlike Hassam's previous images of apple and pear orchards, often in bloom, September Clouds, like Summer in the Park (Private collection), which was also done at Lexington that year, is radical in composition. An apple tree frames the landscape on the left, while another tree on the right, bearing fruit almost ready for harvest, is abruptly cut off in the manner of Japanese prints. The centre of the composition remains provocatively empty, showing only the shadows of cumulus clouds overhead. "Such joyous pictures", it was noted, "indicate a spirit of healthy enjoyment in the production, a gusto on the part of the artist, who convinces his public by every crayon-stroke that it is a fine thing to live, to be young, to be a painter [...] and above all to make [...] such artistic pictures".

Kenneth W. Maddox
 

19th Century19th Century - American painting. ImpressionismPaintingPastelcanvas
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Products and publications

September Clouds

September Clouds

17.00 €

Kandinsky socks

Kandinsky socks

13.50 €

Gabriele Münter. Exhibition catalogue. Hardback. (Spanish + English bilingual edition)

Gabriele Münter. Exhibition catalogue. Hardback. (Spanish + English bilingual edition)

38.00 € 36.10 €

Alex Katz (exhibition catalog. Spanish with texts in English)

Alex Katz (exhibition catalog. Spanish with texts in English)

32.00 € 30.40 €

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September Clouds. Nubes de septiembre, 1891
September Clouds
Childe Hassam

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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September Clouds. Nubes de septiembre, 1891
September Clouds
Childe Hassam

©

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