Building the Schooner, Provincetown

Childe Hassam's 'Building the Schooner, Provincetown' (1900) depicts the shipbuilding activity on Cape Cod's Provincetown harbour, which was then still an active fishing and maritime community before its later reinvention as an artists' colony. Hassam was the leading figure of American Impressionism, and his paintings of New England coastal life documented a working maritime world that was already beginning to fade under the pressure of industrialisation and changing economic patterns. The Birmingham Museum of Art canvas captures the vernacular industry of wooden boat construction with Hassam's characteristic bright palette and broken brushwork.

Hassam applies paint with the open, light-filled brushwork of American Impressionism, using warm yellows and whites to capture the bleached wood and bright coastal light. Figures are loosely indicated, absorbed into the scene rather than individualised. The composition balances the mass of the half-built hull against open sky and water with easy naturalism.