Lion Gardiner House, Easthampton

The celebrated American Impressionist Childe Hassam made his first etchings in 1898 but began to seriously focus on the medium in 1915. He made this image of a nineteenth-century wooden house shortly after buying a property in East Hampton in 1919. While the print ostensibly responds to nineteenth-century architecture and ancient trees, the print's greatest impact comes from its expressive style. Working in monochrome allowed the artist Hassam to emphasize bold surface patterns and to weave effects from the leaves and branches, an expressionism also evident in Hassam's oils of the period.

Built in 1835, the Lion Gardiner house was named for an early English settler who owned extensive properties in eastern Long Island. In 1920 the house was owned by a descendant, David Gardiner. It would be severely damaged by a 1938 hurricane and replaced by a Renaissance style stone mansion.