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Accession #	85.286
Artist	Frederick Childe Hassam
Title	Poppies on the Isles of Shoals
Date	1890
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	frame: 25 3/4 x 29 5/8 x 4 in. (65.4 x 75.2 x 10.2 cm) 18 x 21 15/16 in. (45.7 x 55.7 cm)
Signed	Signed lower right: "Childe Hassam 1890"
Credit Line	Gift of Mary Pratt Barringer and Richardson Pratt, Jr. in memory of Richardson and Laura Pratt
Location	American Identities: Inventing American Landscape

Curatorial Remarks: Throughout his career, Frederick Childe Hassam made several extended trips to Europe, where he was inspired by the sights and the many artists he met there. A Back Road, completed the year after his first European tour, demonstrates a compositional daring and freedom of brushwork that were still unusual in American art of this period. Influenced by the work of the nineteenth-century French Barbizon School, Hassam emphasized heavy brushstrokes and intense lighting effects.

During a return visit several years later, Hassam found “a charming old French garden” at Villiers-le-Bel, near Paris. The setting reminded him of Appledore Island off the coast of Maine, home to his friend, the poet Celia Thaxter. Poppies on the Isles of Shoals is one of a number of works painted on Appledore in the years immediately following his Paris sojourn.