# Maréchal Niel Roses

- By: Childe Hassam (born Dorchester, MA 1859-died East Hampton, NY 1935)
- Date: 1919
- Medium: oil on canvas
- Classification: Paintings
- Dimensions: 26 1/2 x 32 5/8 in. (67.2 x 82.8 cm.)
- Credit line: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly
- Museum: [Smithsonian Institution](https://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=10078)
- Rights: [CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/web/905d3ec410619312d97020f4a19c474f.jpg
- Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

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.