The Altar and the Shrine 1892

Curator: It gives me a somewhat mournful feeling, this overflow of flowers. As if they're present to both honor and commemorate something... someone? Editor: Indeed, a heavy, stifling interior! This feels very much a constructed space, even down to the layering of paints. One sees Hassam deliberately adding density to an otherwise light, airy genre. This piece is *The Altar and the Shrine*, dating to 1892. Curator: I find it so fascinating how Hassam frames domestic life. Even simple flowers, a small table setting becomes charged, imbued with the ritual weight of shared existence. What exactly, or *whom*, do you believe he elevates to the status of shrine? Editor: Given the visible brushstrokes in this watercolor work, he quite plainly foregrounds the hand of the artist here, in addition to showing all of these surfaces – fabrics, the vase shapes and light upon them. It is all surface, nothing more! No depth. Curator: Don’t you find it poignant how this surface treatment suggests fleeting memory itself? See how some forms coalesce, only to dissolve back into abstraction, into that *ground* of daily experience. It reveals more, paradoxically, because of this abstraction. Take the framed portraits near the top... aren’t they ancestors looking on, in effect? Editor: Perhaps, or just more stuff. More objects in an environment primed for accumulation and display. That being said, Hassam manipulates the paint here quite skillfully! Observe the heavy impasto suggesting textile draped across the composition's mid-section, as an illustration of labor as well as adornment. Curator: The shrine could simply be the home, its collective atmosphere given presence by the flowers… by, as you say, the textiles too. Assembled, painted, and remembered! The light is gorgeous: suffusing every object, yes, but it cannot, in the end, break through that pervasive, melancholic mood. Editor: I concede a shift: it is a still life imbued with human touch by way of domestic life. I suppose a melancholy is bound to permeate, given how all these items eventually break, wear out, fade away! Curator: Yes... that’s well put! Everything points back toward something temporal here. Thank you, as always. Editor: Agreed, I have enjoyed parsing this painting from a refreshing angle!