Nocturne
This conversation is connected to Nocturne.
Hassam produced over three thousand works across his career — paintings, watercolors, pastels, etchings, lithographs. Nocturne is a pastel, and a spare one. A crescent moon hangs in a blue sky over water, its reflection drawing a single vertical line of white down the center of the composition. A faint shoreline with a few small forms sits at the bottom edge, and tiny points of warm light dot the distant horizon. The rest is blue — layered strokes of cerulean, cobalt, and violet pulled across the paper in long diagonal hatching. Hassam liked to add a crescent moon symbol next to his signature, a habit he picked up in the 1880s — there's something fitting about this painting being, in a sense, a portrait of his own mark.