Childe Hassam
Frederick Childe Hassam was a prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.
Hassam was born in his family home in Dorchester, Boston, in 1859. His father Frederick was a moderately successful cutlery businessman with a large collection of art and antiques. He descended from a long line of New Englanders. His mother, Rosa, a native of Maine, shared an ancestor with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. His father claimed descent from a seventeenthcentury English immigrant whose name, Horsham, had been corrupted over time to Hassam. With his dark complexion and heavilylidded eyes, many took Childe Hassam to be of Middle Eastern descent speculation which he enjoyed stoking. In the mid1880s, he took to painting an Islamicappearing crescent moon next to his signature, and he adopted the nickname Muley , invoking Muley Abul Hassan, a fifteenthcentury ruler of Granada in Washington Irvings novel Tales of the Alhambra.
Source: Wikipedia