Venetian Glass (Portrait of Kitty Hughes) by Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam
1859-1935 | American

Venetian Glass (Portrait of Kitty Hughes)

Signed and dated “Childe Hassam 1916” (lower right)
Oil on canvas

Widely considered America's most important Impressionist painter, Childe Hassam's radiant portraits of women are among the rarest and most coveted in all of his oeuvre. This magnificent masterwork, entitled Venetian Glass (Portrait of Kitty Hughes), is coming to the market for the very first time, having remained in a museum collection for almost 100 years.

Hassam famously called himself “a painter of light and air,” rejecting the label of “Impressionist” his entire career. At the height of his fame in the early 1910s, Hassam turned his attention to intimate, light-filled interior scenes featuring women in quiet contemplation—a subject that would become his signature. Here, one of the artist's iconic beauties delicately grasps a long-stemmed Murano glass, and she can be identified as one of Hassam's favorite models, Kitty Hughes. Very little is known about her life, yet contemporary newspapers often wrote of her beauty: “One wonders if when she left the studios, if she knew how her beauty would live as long as canvas lasts—always Sweet Kitty Hughes.”

Hassam's trademark techniques are on full display. The palette of warm golds and cool aquamarines is perfectly balanced and absolutely radiant, allowing the luminous figure to emerge from a shimmering atmosphere of pure color. He also masterfully renders an array of difficult textures with precision, from the sheen of her silk kimono and the curl of her auburn hair to the near-invisible translucence of the glass.

Hassam debuted this exceptional masterpiece at the 18th Annual Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in the spring of 1914, and in the months and years that followed, it was exhibited in some of the nation’s most prestigious museums—the St. Louis Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Arts Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It was clearly a personal favorite of Hassam’s, as it remained in the artist’s own collection for the rest of his life. Upon his death in 1935, Hassam bequeathed this painting and several other special works to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, where it has remained until now.

As one of the most important artists in American history, most of Hassam's masterworks of this caliber already reside in important institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art and many more.

This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Hassam’s work in preparation by Stuart P. Feld and Kathleen M. Burnside.

Painted 1913-16

Canvas: 32 3/8” high x 22 3/8” wide (82.1 x 56.7 cm)
Frame: 49” high x 38 3/4” wide x 1 1/4” deep (124.5 x 98.4 x 3.2 cm)

View the Dossier

Provenance:
The artist, 1913–35
Bequest of the above to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, 1935
M.S. Rau, New Orleans

Literature:
“List 344 Paintings at Pittsburgh Show. Eighteenth International Exhibition to Open at Carnegie Institute on April 30,” New York Times, April 20, 1914, p. 11
Moore S. Achenbach, “Art Galleries Are Open For Private View,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, April 30, 1914, p. 7
Glendinning Keeble, “Paintings Seen at Private View,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 30, 1914, p. 16
“Many Artists Will Exhibit,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, April 20, 1914, p. 5
John Lane, “Thumb-Nail Notes on the Annual Exhibition of the Chicago Art Institute,” International Studio 54 (November 1914), p. LV
“Random Impressions in Current Exhibitions,” New-York Tribune, February 25, 1917, p. 21
Adeline Adams, Childe Hassam (New York: American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1938), illus. opposite p. 92 as “Kitty Hughes, 1916”

Exhibited:
Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, April 30–June 30, 1914, Eighteenth Annual Exhibition, no. 149
City Art Museum of St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, from September 6, 1914, Ninth Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists, no. 88
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, November 3–December 6, 1914, Twenty-seventh Annual Exhibition of American Oil Paintings and Sculpture, no. 145
M. Knoedler & Co., New York, February 15–March 3, 1917, Exhibition of American Painters, no. 19
Detroit Museum of Art, Detroit, Michigan, April 9–May 30, 1918, Fourth Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists, no. 123
The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, November 19, 1966–February 11, 1967, Childe Hassam Exhibition, no. 1, as “Kitty Hughes”