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Maréchal Niel Roses
Childe Hassam (born Dorchester, MA 1859-died East Hampton, NY 1935)
1919
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 26 1/2 x 32 5/8 in. (67.2 x 82.8 cm.)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Childe Hassam posed a young model at a mahogany table with two vases of Maréchal Niel roses, a flower named for Napoléon III’s secretary of war. Hassam believed that people were shaped by their environments, and here the hybrid roses symbolize America’s culture, which he thought had absorbed the best elements of European and Asian history. The two women in the painting, a blonde and a brunette, similarly evoke different “strains” that had blended to create an American hybrid of womanhood.
