Childe Hassam | Poppies on the Isles of Shoals, 1890

Throughout his career, Frederick Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935) 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.

Childe Hassam | Poppies on the Isles of Shoals, 1890 | Brooklyn Museum

Henri Fantin-Latour | Portrait of Madame Léon Maître, 1882

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) imbued his sitter - the sister-in-law of a friend - with an air of introspective melancholy, and the delicately rendered jewelry, fan, and corsage reveal his talent for still life.

While working on this portrait, the artist likely saw A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in the studio of his longtime friend Édouard Manet.

Madame Maître’s black, lace-trimmed evening dress, her choker, and the flowers at her décolletage are similar to the barmaid’s.

Henri Fantin-Latour | Portrait of Madame Léon Maître, 1882 | Brooklyn Museum

Both paintings were displayed at the 1882 Paris Salon, but whereas Manet’s ambiguous scene of a lower-class woman at work caused a public sensation, critics praised Fantin-Latour’s more sedate portraits, such as this one, as exemplars of femininity and breeding: "No one expresses like Monsieur Fantin-Latour the freshness of flowers and the natural gentleness of women of good solid bourgeois stock". | Source: © Brooklyn Museum