Frederick Childe Hassam (; October 17, 1859 – August 27, 1935) was an American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.

Early years

Hassam was known to all as "Childe" (pronounced like child), a name taken from an uncle. Hassam was born in the family home on Olney Street on Meeting House Hill in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, on October 17, 1859. His father, Frederick Fitch Hassam (1825–1880), was a moderately successful cutlery businessman with a large collection of art and antiques. He descended from a long line of New Englanders. His mother, Rosa Delia Hawthorne (1832–1880), a native of Maine, shared an ancestor with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. His father claimed descent from a seventeenth-century English immigrant whose name, Horsham, had been corrupted over time to Hassam. With his dark complexion and heavily lidded eyes, many took Childe Hassam to be of Middle Eastern descent—speculation which he enjoyed stoking. In the mid-1880s, he took to painting an Islamic-appearing crescent moon (which eventually degenerated into only a slash) next to his signature, and he adopted the nickname "Muley" (from the Arabic "Mawla", Lord or Master), invoking Muley Abul Hassan, a fifteenth-century ruler of Granada whose life was fictionalized in Washington Irving's novel Tales of the Alhambra.

Hassam demonstrated an interest in art early. He had his first lessons in drawing and watercolor while attending The Mather School, but his parents took little notice of his nascent talent.

As a child, Hassam excelled at boxing and swimming at Dorchester High School. A disastrous fire in November 1872 wiped out much of Boston's commercial district, including his father's business. Hassam left high school after two years (at age 17), and by 1880 his family had moved to nearby Hyde Park. Despite his uncle's offer to pay for a Harvard education, Hassam preferred to help support his family by working. His father arranged a job in the accounting department of publisher Little, Brown & Company. During that time, Hassam studied the art of wood engraving and found employment with engraver George Johnson.  He quickly proved an adept "draughtsman" and produced designs for commercial engravings such as letterheads and newspapers. Beginning to paint artistically, his preferred medium was watercolor, mostly outdoor studies, and around 1879 began creating his earliest oils.

Career

Early career

1880s

In 1882, Hassam became a free-lance illustrator (known as a "black-and-white man" in the trade), and established his first studio. He specialized in illustrating children's stories for magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Scribner's Monthly, and The Century. He continued to develop his technique while attending drawing classes at the Lowell Institute and at the Boston Art Club, where he took life painting classes.

By 1883, Hassam had exhibited watercolors in his first solo exhibition at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston. The following year, his friend Celia Thaxter convinced him to drop his first name and thereafter he was known as "Childe Hassam". He also began to add a crescent symbol in front of his signature, the meaning of which remains speculative, possibly an allusion to his penchant for implying Middle Eastern or Turkish origins.

Having had relatively little formal art training, Hassam was advised by his friend and fellow Boston Art Club member Edmund H. Garrett to join him on a two-month "study trip" to Europe during the summer of 1883. They traveled throughout the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain, studying the Old Masters together and creating watercolors of the European countryside. Hassam was particularly impressed with the watercolors of J. M. W. Turner. Sixty-seven of the watercolors that Hassam painted on this trip formed the basis of his second exhibition in 1884. During this period, Hassam taught at the Cowles Art School. He also joined the "Paint and Clay Club", expanding his contacts in the art community, which included prominent critics and "the readiest and smartest of our younger generation of artists, illustrators, sculptors, and decorators—the nearest thing to Bohemia that Boston can boast." Friends found him to be energetic, robust, outgoing, and unassuming, capable of self-mockery and considerate acts, but he could be argumentative and wickedly witty against those in the art community who opposed him. Hassam was particularly influenced by the circle of William Morris Hunt, who like the great French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, emphasized the Barbizon tradition of working directly from nature. He absorbed their credo that "atmosphere and light are the great things to work for in landscape painting." In 1885, a noted critic, in part responding to Hassam's early oil painting A Back Road (1884), stated that "the Boston taste for landscape painting, founded on this sound French school, is the one vital, positive, productive, and distinctive tendency among our artists today...the truth is poetry enough for these radicals of the new school. It is a healthy, manly muscular kind of art."

In February 1884, after a courtship of several years, Hassam married Kathleen Maude (or Maud) Doane (born 1861), a family friend. Throughout their life together, she ran the household, arranged travel, and attended to other domestic tasks, but little is known about their private life. By the mid-1880s, Hassam began painting cityscapes; Boston Common at Twilight (1885) was of his first. He joined a few other progressive American artists who were taking to heart the advice of French academic master Jean-Léon Gérôme, who abandoned his traditional subject matter and told his American peers, "Look around you and paint what you see. Forget the Beaux-Arts and the models and render the intense life which surrounds you and be assured that the Brooklyn Bridge is worth the Colosseum of Rome and that modern America is as fine as the bric-a-brac of antiquity." However, one Boston critic firmly rejected Hassam's choice of urban subject matter as "very pleasant, but not art." Although he had shown steady improvement in his oil painting, his watercolors continued provided consistent financial success. He returned with his wife to Paris where in 1886 they were able to engage a well-located apartment/studio with a maid near the Place Pigalle, the center of the Parisian art community. With the exception of fellow American artist , they lived among the French and socialized little with other American artists studying abroad.

Hassam had moved to France to study figure drawing and painting at the prestigious Académie Julian. He took advantage of the formal drawing classes with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre, but quickly moved on to self-study, finding that "[t]he Julian academy is the personification of routine...[academic training] crushes all originality out of growing men. It tends to put them in a rut and it keeps them in it", preferring instead, "my own method in the same degree". His first Parisian works were street scenes, employing a mostly brown palette. He sent these works back to Boston and their sale, combined with that of older watercolors, provided him with sufficient income to sustain his stay abroad. In the autumn of 1887, Hassam painted two versions of Grand Prix Day, employing a breakthrough change of palette. In this dramatic change of technique, he was laying softer, more diffuse colors to canvas, similar to the French Impressionists, creating scenes full of light, done with freer brush strokes. He was likely inspired by French Impressionist paintings which he viewed in museums and exhibitions, though he did not meet any of the artists. Hassam eventually became one of the group of American Impressionists known as "The Ten".

The completed pictures he sent home also attracted attention. One reviewer commented: "It is refreshing to note that Mr. Hassam, in the midst of so many good, bad, and indifferent art currents, seems to be paddling his own canoe with a good deal of independence and method. When his Boston pictures of three years ago...are compared with the more recent work...it may be seen how he has progressed." Hassam contributed four paintings to the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris, winning a bronze medal. At that time, he remarked on the emergence of progressive American artists who studied abroad but who did not succumb to French traditions:
The American Section...has convinced me for ever of the capability of Americans to claim a school. Inness, Whistler, Sargent and plenty of Americans just as well able to cope in their own chosen line with anything done over here...An artist should paint his own time and treat nature as he feels it, not repeat the same stupidities of his predecessors...The men who have made success today are the men who have got out of the rut.

As for the French Impressionists, he wrote "Even Claude Monet, Sisley, Pissarro and the school of extreme Impressionists do some things that are charming and that will live." Hassam was later called an "extreme Impressionist". His closest contact with a French Impressionist artist occurred when Hassam took over Renoir's former studio and found some of the painter's oil sketches left behind. "I did not know anything about Renoir or care anything about Renoir. I looked at these experiments in pure color and saw it was what I was trying to do myself."

1890s

The couple returned to the United States in 1889, taking residence in New York City. He resumed his studio illustration and in good weather produced landscapes out-of-doors. He found a studio apartment at Fifth Avenue and 17th Street, a view that he painted in one of his first New York oils, Fifth Avenue in Winter. The fashionable street was traveled at that time by horse-drawn carriages and trolleys. It was one of his favorite paintings and he exhibited it several times. It skillfully uses a distinctive dark palette of blacks and browns (normally considered "forbidden colors" by strict Impressionists) to create a winter urban panorama, which Le Figaro praised for its "American character". For his Washington Arch in Spring (1890), he instead demonstrated a bright pastel palette suffused with white similar to what Monet might have employed.

The sudden shift expanded his options and his range. Through the 1890s, his technique increasingly evolved toward Impressionism in both oil and watercolor, even as the movement itself was giving way to Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. During his European stay, he continued to favor street and horse scenes, avoiding some of the other favorite depictions of the Impressionists, such as opera, cabaret, theater, and boating. He also painted garden and "flower girl" scenes, some featuring his wife, including Geraniums (1888) which he presented at the Salon exhibition in 1889. He managed to exhibit at all three Salon shows during his Paris stay but won only one bronze medal.

Hassam became close friends with fellow American Impressionist artists J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman, whom he met through the American Water Color Society, and over the following months he made many connections in the art community through other art societies and social clubs. He contributed works from his European stay to several exhibitions and shows. Hassam enthusiastically painted the genteel urban atmosphere of New York that he encountered within walking distance of his apartment, and avoided the squalor of the lower-class neighborhoods. He proclaimed that "New York is the most beautiful city in the world. There is no boulevard in all Paris that compares to our own Fifth Avenue...the average American still fails to appreciate the beauty of his own country." He captured well-dressed men in bowler hats and top hats, fashionable women and children out and about, and horse-drawn cabs slowly making their way along crowded thoroughfares lined by commercial buildings (which were generally less than six stories high at that time). Hassam's primary focus would forever continue to be "humanity in motion". He never doubted his own artistic development and his subjects, remaining confident in his instinctual choices throughout his life.

It was through Theodore Robinson, who was working alternatively in America and France, that he, Twachtman, and Weir kept in close touch with Claude Monet, who was residing in Giverny at the time. The four Americans represented the core of American Impressionism, dedicated to painting what was real for them, what was familiar and close at hand, out-of-doors when possible, and with the immediacy of light and shadow—which though exaggerated and falsely colored at times—makes a purposeful impact or impression. The urban scene provided its own unique atmosphere and light, which Hassam found "capable of the most astounding effects" and as picturesque as any seaside scene. The challenge for the urban Impressionist, however, was that activity moved very quickly, and therefore, getting down a complete impression in oil was next to impossible. To compensate, Hassam would find a suitable location, make sketches of the components of his planned painting, then return to the studio to construct a total impression that was actually a composite of smaller scenes.

During the summers, he would work in a more typical Impressionist location, such as Appledore Island, the largest of the Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire, then famous for its artist colony. Social life on the island revolved around the salon of poet Celia Thaxter who hosted artists and literary figures. The group was a "jolly, refined, interesting and artistic set of people...like one large family." There Hassam recalled, "I spent some of my pleasantest summers...(and) where I met the best people in the country." Hassam's subjects for his paintings included Thaxter's flower garden, the rocky landscape, and some interior scenes rendered with his most impressionistic brush strokes to date. In Impressionist fashion, he applied his colors "perfectly clear out of the tube" to unprimed canvas without pre-mixing. Artists displayed their work in Thaxter's salon and were exposed to wealthy buyers staying on the island. Thaxter died in 1894, and in tribute Hassam painted her parlor in The Room of Flowers.

Starting in the mid-1890s, Hassam also made summer painting excursions to Gloucester, Massachusetts; Cos Cob, Connecticut; and Old Lyme, Connecticut; all of them by the sea, but each presenting unique aspects for painting. Even though his sales were good, Hassam continued to take on commercial work, including for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. After a trip to Havana, Cuba, Hassam returned to New York and had his first major one-man auction show at the American Art Galleries in 1896, which featured over 200 works that spanned his entire career to date. The New York Times observed that of the "steadily increasing band of impressionists, Mr. Hassam is a priest high in the councils." Most critics were convinced that he had taken Impressionism too far, one stating that "his key of color has been rising higher and higher until it simply screeches. His impression has been growing more and more bleary-eyed." Another critic declared, "He ignores the public that dearly loves a picture." Hassam realized less than $50 per picture at the auction. Other American artists were also having a difficult time during the general economic slump of 1896. Hassam decided to return to Europe.

Mid-career

The Hassams sailed first to Naples, then to Rome and Florence. Though staying firmly in the Impressionists' corner, Hassam spent much time in galleries and churches studying the Old Masters. The Hassams arrived in Paris in the spring, and then traveled on to England. He continued producing paintings with a very light palette.

Back in New York in 1897, Hassam took part in the secession of Impressionists from the Society of American Artists, forming a new society known as The Ten. The group was energized if not initiated by Hassam, who was among the most radical of members. Their first show at the Durand-Ruel Gallery featured seven of his new European works. Critics dismissed his new work as "experimental" and "quite incomprehensible". Though still interested in including figures in his urban paintings, his new summer works done at Gloucester Harbor, Newport, Old Lyme, and other New England locales show increasing attention to pure landscapes and buildings. His time at the Old Lyme Art Colony, beginning in 1903, caused a shift of the entire colony's output away from the muted colors of Tonalism towards American Impressionism. As his colors became paler and closer in tone to Monet's, which many viewers found unsettling and unfathomable, he was asked how he came up with a particular palette. He responded that "subjects suggest to me a color scheme and I just paint."

In 1900, Hassam visited Provincetown, Massachusetts. Provincetown, once a thriving maritime community had begun to rely heavily on local tourism. In Building the Schooner, Provincetown, he uniquely captures a rare event in the community: the building of a schooner. The ship featured in Hassam's work was paid for by a Chicago millionaire and was the first large ship to be built in Provincetown in a quarter of a century.

Hassam was astute in marketing his work, and was represented by dealers and museums in several cities and abroad. Despite the critics and conservative buyers, he managed to keep selling and painting without having to resort to teaching for financial survival. A colleague described Hassam as an artist "with a keen knowledge of distribution, the tactical ability to place his work." As the new century began, some three decades after the Impressionists' first exhibitions in France, Impressionism finally gained a legitimacy in the American art community, and Hassam began to sell to major museums and receive jury awards and medals, vindicating his belief in his vision. In 1906, he was elected Academician of the National Academy of Design.

After a brief period of depression and drinking as part of an apparent mid-life crisis, the forty-five-year-old Hassam then committed himself to a healthier life style, including swimming. During this time he felt a spiritual and artistic rejuvenation and he painted some Neo-Classical subjects, including nudes in outdoor settings. His urban subjects began to diminish and he confessed that he was tiring of city life, as bustling subways, elevated trains, and motor buses supplanted the graciousness of the horse-drawn scenes which he so enjoyed capturing in earlier times. The architecture of the city changed as well. Stately mansions gave way to skyscrapers, which he admitted had their own artistic appeal: "One must grant of course that if taken individually a skyscraper is not much of a marvel of art as a wildly formed architectural freak. It is when taken in groups with their zig zag outlines towering against the sky and melting tenderly into the distance that the skyscrapers are truly beautiful." Hassam's urban paintings took on a higher perspective and humans shrank in size accordingly, as illustrated in Lower Manhattan (1907). He began to spend only his winters in New York and traveled the balance of the year, calling himself "the Marco Polo of the painters." In 1904 and 1908, he traveled to Oregon and was stimulated by new subjects and diverse views, frequently working out-of-doors with friend, lawyer and amateur painter Colonel C. E. S. Wood. He produced over 100 paintings, pastels, and watercolors of the High Desert, the rugged coast, the Cascades, scenes of Portland, and even nudes in idealized landscapes (a series of bathers comparable to those of Symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes). As usual, he adapted his style and colors to the subject at hand and the mood of place, but always in the Impressionist vein.

Late career

With the art market now eagerly accepting his work, by 1909 Hassam was enjoying great success, earning as much as $6,000 per painting. His close friend and fellow artist J. Alden Weir commented to another artist, "Our mutual friend Hassam has been in the greatest of luck and merited success. He sold his apartment studio and has sold more pictures this winter, I think, than ever before and is really on the crest of the wave. So he goes around with a crisp, cheerful air."

The Hassams returned to Europe in 1910 to find Paris much changed: "The town is all torn up like New York. Much building going on. They out American the Americans!" In the midst of the vibrant city, Hassam painted July Fourteenth, Rue Daunou during the Bastille Day celebrations, a forerunner of his famous Flag series (see below).

When he returned to New York, Hassam began a series of "window" paintings that he continued until the 1920s, usually featuring a contemplative female model in a flowered kimono before a light-filled curtained or open window, as in The Goldfish Window (1916). The scenes were popular with museums and quickly snapped up. Hassam was especially prolific and energetic in the period from 1910 to 1920, causing one critic to comment, "Think of the appalling number of Hassam pictures there will be in the world by the time the man is seventy years old!" Hassam truly did produce thousands of works in nearly every medium during his life. Where his friend Weir might paint six canvases in a season, Hassam would do forty.

During that period he also returned to watercolors and oils of coastal scenes, as exemplified by The South Ledges, Appledore (1913), which employs an unusually balanced division of sea and rocks diagonally across a nearly square canvas, giving equal weight to sea and land, water and rock. This painting shows the famous writer Celia Thaxter's home in Appledore Island. The South Ledges, Appledore is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.
He also produced some still-life paintings.

Hassam displayed six paintings at the landmark Armory Show of 1913, where Impressionism was finally viewed as mainstream and nearly an historical style, and displaced by the clamor over the radical revolution of Cubism, fresh from Europe. He and Weir were the oldest exhibitors, nicknamed at a press dinner as "the mammoth and the mastodon of American Art". Hassam viewed the new art trends from abroad with alarm, stating "this is the age of quacks, and quackery, and New York City is their objective point." He was also displeased that the Armory Show drew attention away from the latest exhibits of The Ten.

In 1913, Hassam was honored with a separate gallery showing at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, featuring thirty-eight pictures. Around 1915, he renewed his interest in etching and lithography, producing more than 400 of these works during his later career. While Hassam found these works artistically satisfying, they received a tepid public response, as he commented, "some sell and some of the best do not."

The Flag series

The most distinctive and famous works of Hassam's later life comprise the set of some thirty paintings known as the "Flag series". He began these in 1916 when he was inspired by a "Preparedness Parade" (for the US involvement in World War I), which was held on Fifth Avenue in New York (renamed the "Avenue of the Allies" during the Liberty Loan Drives of 1918). Thousands participated in these parades, which often lasted for over twelve hours.

Being an avid Francophile, of English ancestry, and strongly anti-Germany, Hassam enthusiastically backed the Allied cause and the protection of French culture. The Hassams joined with other artists in the war relief effort from nearly the beginning of the conflict in 1914, when most Americans as well as President Woodrow Wilson were decidedly isolationist. Hassam even considered volunteering to record the war in Europe, but the government would not approve the trip. He was even arrested (and quickly released) for innocently sketching naval maneuvers along the city's rivers. In addition to the time he gave to many committees, several of his flag pictures were contributed to the war relief in exchange for Liberty Bonds. Although he had great hopes that the entire series would sell as a war memorial set (for $100,000), the pictures were sold individually after several group exhibitions, the last at the Corcoran Gallery in 1922.

Claude Monet, among other French artists, had also painted flag-themed works, but Hassam's have a distinctly American character, showing the flags displayed on New York's most fashionable street with his own compositional style and artistic vision. In most paintings in the series, the flags dominate the foreground, while in others the flags are simply part of the festive panorama. In some, the American flags wave alone and in others, flags of the Allies flutter as well. In his most impressionistic painting in the series, The Avenue in the Rain (1917), which has been in the White House permanent collection since the Kennedy administration, the flags and their reflections are blurred so extremely as to appear to be viewed through a rain-smeared window. On entering the White House, Barack Obama chose to display it in the Oval Office. Hassam's flag paintings cover all seasons and various weather and light conditions. Hassam makes a patriotic statement without overt reference to parades, soldiers, or war, apart from one picture showing a flag exclaiming "Buy Liberty Bonds". Flag paintings by Hassam are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art.

Final years
In 1919, Hassam purchased a home in East Hampton, New York. Many of his late paintings employed nearby subjects in that town and elsewhere on Long Island. The post-war art market boomed in the 1920s, and Hassam commanded escalating prices, though some critics thought he had become static and repetitive, as American art had begun to move on to the Realism of the Ashcan School and artists like Edward Hopper and Robert Henri. In 1920, he received the Gold Medal of Honor for lifetime achievement from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and numerous other awards through the 1920s. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics. Hassam traveled relatively little in his last years, but did visit California, Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico. He died in East Hampton in 1935, at age 75.

He denounced modern trends in art to the end of his life, and he termed "art boobys" all the painters, critics, collectors, and dealers who got on the bandwagon and promoted Cubism, Surrealism and other avant-garde movements. Until a revival of interest in American Impressionism in the 1960s, Hassam was considered among the "abandoned geniuses". As French Impressionist paintings reached stratospheric prices in the 1970s, Hassam and other American Impressionists gained renewed interest and were bid up as well.

Gallery

References

Notes

Sources

Further reading

Kiehl, David W. (1977). Childe Hassam as printmaker : a selection in various media, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

External links

 Online Monograph
 Frederick Childe Hassam Virtual Gallery 442 works by the artist
 Links to images by Childe Hassam by Artcylcopedia
 Dorchester Atheneum biography

19th-century American painters
American male painters
20th-century American painters
American Impressionist painters
American landscape painters
American portrait painters
Art Students League of New York faculty
Painters from Boston
People from Long Island
1859 births
1935 deaths
Masterpiece Museum
National Academy of Design members
Académie Julian alumni
20th-century American printmakers
People from Dorchester, Massachusetts
Members of the Salmagundi Club
19th-century American male artists
People from Hyde Park, Boston
Olympic competitors in art competitions
20th-century American male artists
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Childe Hassam


The Gunman is a 2015 action thriller film directed by Pierre Morel and written by Don Macpherson, Pete Travis and Sean Penn, based on the novel The Prone Gunman (French title: La position du tireur couché) by Jean-Patrick Manchette. It stars Penn along with Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, Mark Rylance, Jasmine Trinca and Ray Winstone. The film is about Jim Terrier (Penn), a mercenary who assassinates the Minister of Mining of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006 on orders from multinational mining companies. Eight years after Terrier has retired from mercenary work, he and the people close to him become the targets of hit squads sent by a powerful multinational security firm, and he must fight to stay alive. The film was released on March 20, 2015 by Open Road Films. It was a box office bomb, grossing just $24 million against its $40 million budget and receiving a poor critical reception.

Plot
American Jim Terrier is a former Special Forces soldier who has become a black-ops mercenary. He is part of a team deployed by a corporation in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006, under the cover of providing security to local projects. He falls in love with Annie, a fellow expat working as an NGO doctor in a local hospital. During this period, even though civil war has wreaked havoc on the country, large multinational mining companies continue to profit from the country's mining industry. After the Minister of Mining announces his plans to declare contracts with the mining companies unjust and renegotiate the terms, the mining companies hire Terrier's team to assassinate the Minister to ensure their access to the rich mineral resources. Terrier delivers the fatal shot from a sniper rifle and flees from Africa, leaving Annie behind. After that, Terrier retires from his mercenary career.

Eight years later he returns to DRC as a charity worker to build wells. One day Terrier is brutally assaulted by a local hit squad, but he manages to kill them all. While searching the attackers' bodies, he finds signs that the attack was not random and that he was the target. Scared and suspicious, Terrier flees to London to meet an ex-mercenary colleague Cox, who reveals that Felix Marti, their ex-boss in the Congo assassination, has formed a large international security firm offering its services to major clients, such as the Pentagon. The firm's head wants to eliminate all of the former members of the assassination squad as revelations of their former activities could hinder the development of the new firm. Now the firm's hit teams chase Terrier around the clock, meanwhile killing his friends and kidnapping Annie.

However, Terrier still keeps highly compromising materials that can reveal Cox's role in the Congo assassination and uses it to lure Cox and his team to a bullfight in Spain, threatening to expose their complicity unless they trade Annie for the evidence. Unknown to them, Terrier makes a deal with Interpol to provide evidence to aid their ongoing investigation. Despite battling severe head trauma suffered from his violent past, Terrier defeats the experienced mercenaries sent to kill him. As he struggles to help Annie escape to safety, Cox discovers them. Terrier is wounded but manages to shoot Cox, who is then gored by a loose bull. Interpol officers arrive and take Terrier into custody, though Agent Barnes promises to do what he can to help Terrier avoid doing more jail time than necessary.

The film ends with Terrier, recovered and released from prison, reuniting with Annie in the DRC.

Cast
 Sean Penn as Jim Terrier
 Javier Bardem as Felix Marti
 Idris Elba as Jackie Barnes
 Mark Rylance as Terrance Cox
 Jasmine Trinca as Annie
 Ray Winstone as Stanley
 Peter Franzén as Reiniger
 Billy Billingham as Reed
 Daniel Adegboyega as Bryson
 Ade Oyefeso as Eugene

Production

Development
Circa January 2013, French action director Pierre Morel (Taken) entered negotiations to direct Sean Penn in Prone Gunman, an action thriller being produced by Silver Pictures' Joel Silver and Andrew Rona. The film is based on the 1981 novel The Prone Gunman by French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette. The project, from Silver Pictures, was fully financed by StudioCanal, who sold out rights to the film at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

In May 2013, Deadline Hollywood reported that Javier Bardem would play a villain. In June, Deadline stated that Ray Winstone had just joined the project. He played a mentor of the hitman (Penn), who is betrayed and then hunted by the organization he worked for. Italian actress Jasmine Trinca was cast as the female lead. Bardem played Trinca's husband, and Elba played a mysterious operative named Dupont.

On May 8, 2014, Open Road Films acquired the US distribution rights to the film.

Filming
Principal photography took place in the spring of 2013 in Barcelona and Logroño, Spain; Gibraltar; Cape Town, South Africa; and Wimbledon Studios, England.

Reception

Box office
The Gunman grossed $10.7 million in the United States and Canada and $13.5 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $24.2 million, against a production budget of $40 million.

The film grossed $5 million in its opening weekend, finishing at 4th at the box office.

Critical response
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 17% based on 171 reviews, with an average rating of 4.4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "With an uninspired plot and rote set pieces that are overshadowed by its star's physique, The Gunman proves a muddled misfire in the rapidly aging Over-50 Action Hero genre." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating, the film has a score of 39 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.

Guy Lodge of Variety called it a "rote, humorless thriller" and "a distinctly unconvincing attempt to refashion the star — who also co-wrote and produced — as a middle-aged action hero in the Liam Neeson mold."
Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post wrote: "The Gunman may start as a genre exercise of promising purpose, but it winds up being just a lot of bull."

References

External links

2015 films
2015 action thriller films
American action thriller films
French action thriller films
Spanish action thriller films
Films directed by Pierre Morel
Films based on French novels
Films set in London
Films shot in Barcelona
Nostromo Pictures films
StudioCanal films
Silver Pictures films
Films scored by Marco Beltrami
English-language French films
English-language Spanish films
Open Road Films films
2010s English-language films
2010s American films
2010s French films
2010s Spanish films

The Gunman (2015 film)


Gustave Achille Guillaumet (26 March 1840 – 14 March 1887) was a French artist.  He is best known for his paintings of North Africa.

Early life
Gustave Guillaumet was born in 1840 in Puteaux (now in the Hauts-de-Seine, Paris).

Career
Guillaumet was initially a student of François-Edouard Picot and Félix-Joseph Barrias.  In 1857 he joined the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he became a student of Alexandre Abel de Pujol.

In 1861 Guillaumet entered the Historical Landscape category of the Prix de Rome for a scholarship to study at the Academy of France in Rome.  On failing to win, he instead travelled across the Mediterranean to Algeria, in north Africa.  While there he contracted malaria and had to spend three months at the military hospital in Biskra.

Guillaumet visited Algeria ten times between 1861 and 1867.  He preferred to travel in the south and many of his works depict the life of the people of the desert.

Whereas Orientalism generally gave a deliberately idealised or anecdotal picture of north Africa, Guillaumet's work was notable for portraying the harshness of life in a desert region. The Sahara features the carcass of a camel in the foreground with a caravan – or mirage of one – on the horizon and empty desert in-between. It was first exhibited to considerable success at the Salon of 1868.

Between 1879 and 1884 La Nouvelle Revue published tableaux of Algerian scenes collected together by Guillaumet.  These were later published as a book, Tableaux Algériens.  It includes twelve etchings by Guillaumet, Courtry, Paul Edmé Le Rat, Adolphe-Alphonse Géry-Bichard, August Müller and Toussaint; six photogravures by Dujardin and one hundred and twenty-eight engravings in relief from drawings and sketches by Guillaumet, himself.  The book was published in 1888, after Guillaumet's death and is prefaced by a note on his life by Eugène Mouton.

In 1878, Guillaumet was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour, the highest decoration in France.

Personal life
His son Gustave Guillaume (whose family name was changed), born in 1883, became a famous linguist.

Death
Guillaumet died in Paris in 1887. Speculation about the circumstances of his death, supposedly of peritonitis, was published in The New York Times on 6 April.  The article claimed that Guillaumet had left his wife and son to live with "a lady who was his senior by many years" but that a few weeks before his death he had shot himself following an argument with his mistress.

Guilaumet is buried in Montmartre Cemetery.  His tomb bears a sculpture by Louis-Ernest Barrias of a Young girl from Bou Saâda, dropping flowers onto a portrait of Guillaumet embossed on a medallion.

Paintings
Arab Ploughing with Camels in the Evening Landscape, 1861
The Oasis, 1862
Evening Prayer in the Sahara, 1863, exhibited at the Salon of 1863 (Musée d'Orsay)
The Sahara, also known as The Desert, 1867 (Musée d'Orsay)
Laghouat, Algerian Sahara , 1879, exhibited at the Salon of 1879 (Musée d'Orsay)
Saharan Dwelling, near Biskra, Algeria , 1882 (Chrysler Museum of Art)
Dogs of the Douar Devouring a Dead Horse in the Gorges of El Kantar, 1883
Irrigation Channel, near Biskra, Algeria , 1884, exhibited at the Salon of 1885 (Musée d'Orsay)
Mountains in North Africa, with a Bedouin Camp (The National Gallery)
Weavers of Bou-Saada, exhibited at the Salon of 1885 (Musée d'Orsay)
Inside Bou-Saâda  (Musée d'Orsay)
 Flute Players in bivouac, location Musée d'Orsay Salle des Orientalist

Selected works

See also

 List of Orientalist artists
 Orientalism

References

External links

 Photograph of Guillaumet's tomb in Montmartre cemetery
 Sketches by Guillaumet

Orientalism
French orientalists
French landscape painters
19th-century French painters
French male painters
Orientalist painters
People from Puteaux
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
École des Beaux-Arts alumni
Recipients of the Legion of Honour
Knights of the Legion of Honour
1840 births
1887 deaths
Burials at Montmartre Cemetery
French male writers

Gustave Achille Guillaumet


Aidan Southall (11 September 1920 – 17 May 2009) was a British cultural anthropologist recognised for his fieldwork in urban settings in post-war Africa. Often identified as a pioneer in the study of African cities, Southall is said to have played a significant role in the development of urban anthropology.  In 2009, Aidan Southall died. He was married to Betty Stogdon (1945-1966), Isis Ragheb (1966-1973) and Christine Obbo who survived him together with his children with Betty: daughter Lucinda; and son Mark and his wife Madeline with their children Christopher, Catherine and Andrew.

Early life and education
Southall, the son of a Church of England parson, was born in Warwickshire, England. Having been born into an impoverished family, Southall was unable to attend boarding school with his friends. He attended a preparatory school, The Perse School in Cambridge, England, at the age of 8 years old. At the age of 11, Southall began his secondary education and eventually worked his way up to Cambridge University where he initially studied classics. During his last year at Cambridge, at the age of 18, Southall had the opportunity to travel to Jamaica—his first exotic experience. Shortly after this, Southall switched over to anthropology after having been persuaded by one of his professors. At Cambridge University, he gained his bachelor's degree in social and cultural anthropology. After graduating in 1942, Southall followed his colleagues to Uganda with the interest of pursuing social anthropology as a career. He eventually attended the University of London where he gained his PhD.

Career
Southall was given the opportunity to apply for a position at Makerere University in Uganda, and in 1945 he became a professor of social studies at this institution. He had the opportunity to carry out research in that particular area among others in Africa, and eventually conducted fieldwork in Nyanza with a Luo student in Kenya. In Karachuonyo, South Nyanza, being restricted to a short-term study over the span of his vacation, Southall found it difficult to conduct long-term fieldwork and therefore focused on food and lineages. While researching the Luo People, Southall made a short visit to Alur, which became one of his most significant life changing experiences from which he published his first written work called Alur Society. He returned to Alur in 1948 and spent two years there conducting doctoral fieldwork. In the 1950s, Southall became more interested in urban anthropology, and some his work focused on the complexity of developing urban areas. Unlike most anthropologists of his time, Southall was generally interested in urbanisation and the development of African cities in particular.

After completing his PhD in 1952 in London, he returned to Makerere as a member of East African Institute of Social Research. During his years at Makerere, he obtained a UNESCO fellowship which slowly contributed to the expansion of his notability and connection through a visit to the United States. There, he encountered other influential researchers, including sociologist Talcott Parsons, who influenced Southall in developing an appreciation for Max Weber's work. As it reflected in his publications, there was a gradual shift in Southall's theoretical position as he began adopting more Marxist views.

After teaching at Makarere University, Southall taught at several other schools including the University of East Africa, the University of California, and Syracuse University. He taught from 1969 at the  University of Wisconsin-Madison, becoming professor emeritus in 1990.  Due to extensive fieldwork and research, Southall was also able to become fluent in several languages including Nilotic languages, Swahili and French. He also became a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Furthermore, Southall was also a member of International African Institute, The African Studies Association of USA and the American Anthropological Association.

Work
For his doctoral dissertation, Aidan Southall wrote Alur Society: A Study in Processes and Types of Domination (1956), which dealt with political structures among the Alur people of Northwest Uganda. He carried out anthropological fieldwork among the Alur people for approximately two years between 1949 and 1952. Southall described a continuous process of political and cultural domination, done almost entirely without the use of force.

His next publication was Townsmen in the Making: Kampala and its Suburbs (1957), featuring two specific reports that were developed as part of a general study of African life in greater Kampala, Uganda. Examining such issues as land, housing, economic activity, and marriage, Southall drew upon the survey results for specific information while also supplementing quantitative data with qualitative material and anecdotes.

As Aidan Southall grew more experienced in observing urban systems, he released Social Change in Modern Africa (1961), which contained the proceedings of the First International African Institute Seminar at Makarere, a Kampala school where he taught. This seminar and  publication speculated about how complex social systems should be studied.

"The Illusion of the Tribe" was published in 1970 in The Passing of Tribal Man, edited by  P.C.W. Gutkind, and reprinted in 2010 in Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation.

Southall later published a collection of papers, originally presented at the Wenner-Gren seminar of 1964, about cross cultural similarities in the urbanisation process. This collection of papers was titled Urban Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies of Urbanization (1973) and attempted to identify and characterise significant issues in urban anthropology.

Later that decade, Southall published a collection of essays entitled Small Urban Centers in Rural Development in Africa (1979). His essays are broken down in different categories, the first of which represented the social and anthropological perspective. Other essays took historical or political viewpoints, followed by economic case studies, and finished with an argument about whether their findings are conceptual or theoretical in nature.

Aidan Southall's next big published work, in conjunction with Greg Gulin, was entitled Urban Anthropology in China (1993). This text originated at the First International Urban Anthropology Conference in China in December 1989, after being postponed and put on hold many times. This collection of essays involves Chinese urban ethnicity, finished off by Chinese urban culture and life cycles.

His final book was The City in Time and Space (2000), written about cities on a grand scale. Having studied urbanisation his entire life, this book was an overview of what he believed the life process to encompass.  The book starts off as a survey of implications, varying across time and space, of demographic, social, cultural, political, and economic concentration for society as a whole.

According to social anthropologist Ray Abrahams:

References

External links
 Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 7 July 2005 (video)

1920 births
2009 deaths
People educated at The Perse School
20th-century British anthropologists
British expatriates in Uganda
British expatriates in Kenya
British expatriates in the United States
Presidents of the African Studies Association

Aidan Southall


The Casa da Música is a concert hall in Porto, Portugal. It was designed by architect Rem Koolhaas and opened in 2005.

Designed to mark the festive year of 2001 in which the city of Porto was designated European Capital of Culture, it was the first building in Portugal aimed from its conception to be exclusively dedicated to music, either in public performances or in the field of artistic training and creation.

Casa da Música's project was set in motion in 1999 as a result of an international architecture tender won by the project presented by Rem Koolhaas - Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Ground was broken in 1999 at the old tram terminus station in Boavista roundabout (Rotunda da Boavista), and Casa da Musica was inaugurated on 15 April 2005.

History

On 1 September 1998, the Ministro da Cultura (Ministry of Culture) announced the construction of Casa da Música, during the ambit of Porto's 2001 tenure as the European Capital of Culture.

The building engineers were AFA Arup Group Limited (London), together with Afassociados (Porto). It was designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, in association with the Porto Office of Metropolitan Architecture, the scene agency Ducks scéno, the acoustician Renz Van Luxemburg and AFA, while the interiors were designed by Inside Outside (Petra Blaisse). These included the 13 large surfaces, ranging from  to , with a gold leaf woodgrain pattern in the large auditorium.

Its location was decided on 8 March 1999, on a municipal tract of Boavista. The site was once a staging area for trams. Construction occurred in the next four years over schedule, and cost 100 million euros. The project challenged engineers because of the building's unusual configuration.

It was open to the public on 14 April 2005, with performances by Clã and Lou Reed, while the official inauguration occurred the next day in the presence of the Portuguese president, prime minister, other notable politicians and members of Portuguese society, with a concert by the Orquestra Nacional do Porto (Porto National Orchestra). It immediately became a city icon. Featuring a 1300-seat auditorium suffused with daylight, it is the only concert hall in the world with two walls made entirely of glass.

On 5 November 2005, an administrative process was begun to classify the building as Imóvel de Interesse Público (Property of Public Interest).

The building's design was acclaimed worldwide. Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic from The New York Times, called it the "most attractive project the architect Rem Koolhaas has ever built" and indicated that it is "a building whose intellectual ardor is matched by its sensual beauty". He also compared it to the "exuberant design" in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. "Only looking into the original aspect of the building, this is one of the most important concert halls built in the last 100 years". He compares it to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, and the Berliner Philharmonie.

A foundation, the Fundação Casa da Música, was instituted on 26 January 2006 under decree 16/2006. But, in reference to its classification, the process was archived on 15 March 2011.

In September 2008, the Casa da Música hosted the Orquestra Nacional do Porto, which took part in exploratory public presentations in which music was captured alongside the musicians' and conductor's expressive gestures. Various sensor networks sourced and translated musical expressions into computer-driven visual interpretations (which included lighting, projected images, and real-time improvisations). Scientific articles were also published on special-needs performances and workshops in the Casa da Música in 2007 and 2008.

Architecture

The building is shaped as a nine-floor-high asymmetrical polyhedron covered in plaques of white cement, cut by large undulated or plane glass windows. It is accessible through a front stairway and stands at the center of a vast open plaza of marble, yellow with hint of brown.  Its isolated architectural form, deeply set back from adjacent streets, including the main Avenida da Boavista, and from the city's prime ceremonial public space, the Praça Mouzinho de Albuquerque, is evocative of the hull of a ship beached at low tide. It deliberately challenges the neoclassical order of converging avenues and the vast oval of continuous blocks centered on a tall monument, Heroes of the Peninsular War, that has defined the Praça.

See also
 World Architecture Survey

References

Sources

External links

 Casa da Música
 Office for Metropolitan Architecture
 Petra Blaisse's Inside Outside

2005 establishments in Portugal
Tourist attractions in Porto
Music venues in Portugal
Concert halls in Portugal
Theatres and concert halls in Porto
Rem Koolhaas buildings
Ove Arup buildings and structures
Music venues completed in 2005

Casa da Música