Giant Magnolias, 1904
Oil on canvas, 35 x 20"
Original purchase fund from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, ARCA Foundation, and Anne Cannon Forsyth, 1967.2.2

Childe Hassam introduced ancestry into American Impressionism.  Whether painting a hoary old house on Long Island, a closely cropped New England church, or an iconic southern flower, Hassam pointed his viewer to a place and a past.  In a rapidly changing United States, this visual tactic held widespread appeal and Hassam and his peers replaced painters such as Church, Whittredge, and Bierstadt as critical favorites.  By treating sentimental subjects with contemporary technique, Hassam largely avoided the censure of modernist critics who charged his predecessors with overt Victorian romanticism.  Unusual in subject matter for Hassam, Giant Magnolias is a fitting painting for a southern museum.