Clarissa’s Window is one of a group of notable canvases featuring solitary women that Hassam created during his many sojourns at the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich, Connecticut. [1] There, he was at the center of a sizable company of artists and writers who flowed in and out of the popular coastal retreat over several decades.

Hassam usually stayed at Holley House, a genteel boarding establishment that catered mainly to the influx of bohemian urbanites. The large colonial house was owned by Constant (née Holley) and her husband, the artist Elmer Livingston MacRae, who took over its operation from her parents on their marriage in 1900. [2] Although Hassam focused mainly on the Cos Cob scenery, he produced eleven oils depicting solitary young women within the boarding house’s environs. The first of these was Listening to the Orchard Oriole (1902, United States Department of State), which shows a model standing on the second-floor veranda of Holley House. Neither inside nor outside, she occupies a liminal point that demarcates the boundary separating domestic space and the outer world. In this context the painting may be considered to be a precursor of the Windows Series that Hassam began in New York in 1909 in that it underscores issues concerning the social territory assigned to women. This thematic trope is exemplified by New York Window (1912, National Gallery of Art) in which a languid figure is positioned against a curtained window offering only a veiled view of the bustling metropolis.

Clarissa’s Window shares with many of these paintings in the portrayal of models clothed in kimonos, a style of dress signifying the vogue for Japonisme that had lingered for decades in American and European art. The occasional presence of the Japanese artist Genjiro Yeto at the Cos Cob colony may have fueled Hassam’s interest in having his models dress in a manner that suggested exoticism and seduction (associated with the geisha) as well as aesthetic refinement. [3] These conceptual correspondences contribute to interpretations along these lines of Clarissa’s Window and other works such as the more elaborate Bowl of Goldfish (David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University), the latter of which presents what may be the same model posed against windows opening onto a similarly lush, sunlit garden. [4]

Unlike the women in the New York series of window subjects, however, Hassam’s Cos Cob women stand before open windows, thus insinuating the possibility of access to a less restrictive existence. Clarissa’s Window deploys an added sensibility; one found in the model’s reflection in the windowpane on the left that prompts comparisons to a substantial number of works by Hassam’s contemporaries which portray women and their mirrored reflections. The model’s doubled image allows for speculation about the dualities shaping women’s lives – the actualities and the possibilities. Indeed, the model in Clarissa’s Window expresses a deep sense of yearning conveyed by the positioning of her hands as they touch the frame of the window as if to signal an awareness of the barriers to a life beyond the domestic realm. Such thoughts are heightened by the abrupt contrast between the bright light showering the garden and the shadowed room she occupies.

The painting’s title has sometimes led to the assumption that it was Clarissa, a twin daughter of the MacRaes, who modeled for this and other Cos Cob works. [5] Because she would have been only nine or ten years old at the time the painting was executed this assumption must be ruled out. The model has been identified as Helen Burke, a teenage daughter of the local tavern owner who supplied wines and liquor to Holley House. [6] Thus, the painting must be read in literal terms designated by its title: that it does quite simply show Clarissa’s window in Holley House.

Clarissa’s Window was one of four paintings Hassam exhibited in The Ten’s annual exhibition held at New York’s Montross Gallery in 1914. [7] A critic praised the work declaring, “Most successful of all is ‘Clarissa’s Window,’ a charming subject with a figure looking out of doors, bathed in clear, delightful light, and every inch of it superb in color.” [8] Although mistaken in identifying the model as Clarissa, the Brooklyn Eagle’s reviewer also wrote about it favorably, saying, “In ‘Clarissa’s Window,’ showing a decoratively painted gown worn by Clarissa, the suavity of the entire foreground sets off well the view of a garden, green and sunlit, outside of her window.” [9] The painting was reproduced in Guy Pène du Bois’s summary of the exhibition, in which he commented, “One expects to find the painters’ language nimbly handled here and one always finds it nimbly handled, whether in the inevitable tour de force . . . by William Merritt Chase, or in the inevitable, of later years, girl by the window, from the…brush of Childe Hassam.” [10]

[1] For a thorough history of the Cos Cob art colony, see Susan G. Larkin, The Cos Cob Colony: Impressionists on the Connecticut Shore (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).

[2] Now the Bush-Holley Museum, the house dates back to the early eighteenth century. The Holley family acquired the property in 1848 and started running the house as a boarding establishment in 1882.

[3] For a valuable discussion of Hassam’s “kimono imagery”, see Larkin, pp. 149-153.

[4] The potential for more complex readings of Hassam’s paintings of female subjects has not been fully explored. As Larkin has written, “. . . Hassam’s images of women in New York and Cos Cob reveal his contrasting views of city and country and illuminate his attitudes about nature, modernity, gender, and class.” Larkin, The Cos Cob Colony, p. 146.

[5] Hassam’s 1912 portrait of a child (Clarissa, b. 1904) sitting in the front hall of Holley House is in the collection of the Greenwich Historical Society and hangs in the very spot portrayed in the painting.

[6] Helen Burke modeled for a number of Hassam’s Cos Cob paintings and etchings. Her sittings to the artist were reportedly arranged by the MacRaes. See William H. Gerdts, “Three Themes for God and Country,” in Warren Adelson, et al., Childe Hassam: Impressionist (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1999), p. 213 (Gerdts credited Kathleen Burnside for establishing the model’s identity).

[7] See William H. Gerdts, “The Ten: A Critical Chronology” in Ten American Painters (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1990), p. 62, where the painting is described as “a woman characteristically clothed in a kimono, in a variation of his New York Window series.” The work is also listed as no. 12 on p. 181 in “Index to the Exhibitions of the Ten.” See as well, Kathleen Burnside, “Childe Hassam,” in Ten American Painters, pp. 103-107. Like fellow Cos Cob colony members John H. Twachtman and J. Alden Weir, Hassam was a key member of The Ten, a secessionist association that broke away from the Society of American Artists over aesthetic differences founded on the members’ allegiance to Impressionist facture.

[8] “Good Pictures by the Ten,” New-York Tribune, March 20, 1914, p. 9.

[9] “Ten Americans are now Seven,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 19, 1914, p. 12.

[10] Guy Pène du Bois, “Exhibitions at the Galleries,” Arts and Decoration, vol. 4, no. 7 (May 1914), p. 280; illus. p. 278.