About this work
*Old Dominy House, Easthampton* is an etching made in 1928 , and it is one of Hassam's most quietly authoritative architectural portraits. The composition focuses on a house that was home to several generations of the Dominy family of East Hampton — a lean-to type structure built in 1715 on the west side of Main Street. Hassam draws the eye to the facade with a printmaker's economy: the beaded clapboard siding, the overhanging molded cornice, the molded window and door hoods, and the balanced composition all rendered through precise, confident linework. Where his oil paintings dissolved architecture into light and atmosphere, this etching holds the structure accountable to its lines — every shadow cast by the eaves, every weathered plank, fixed in ink. The effect is intimate rather than monumental, a document of place made by a man who genuinely knew the street.
Hassam inscribed the plate *East Hampton Oct 7–8–10th, 1928* , pinning the work to an early autumn working session — the kind of deliberate, on-site observation that defined his print practice. In 1919, Hassam had purchased a home in East Hampton, and many of his late works employed nearby subjects in that town and elsewhere on Long Island.
Around that time, he had renewed his interest in etching and lithography, producing more than 400 of these works during his later career. The Dominy House was itself a landmark of uncommon historical weight: from 1760 until 1840, three generations of the Dominy family — Nathaniel IV, Nathaniel V, and Felix — worked in the woodworking and clockmaking shops that flanked the house, producing furniture, clocks, and watch repairs that made them celebrated craftsmen far beyond Long Island. By the time Hassam sat down to etch it, the print was included in a 2003 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art titled *Portraits of Places: The Prints of Childe Hassam, an American Impressionist* — a title that captures exactly what this work is: a portrait, not a souvenir. The etching now resides in both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.
This print suits a room that values restraint. Its warm ivory-and-sepia tones read well against natural wood, aged linen, or deep-painted walls — a study, a library, a hallway in an older house where the architecture itself has something to say. Hassam's East Hampton prints delineate beautiful sun-dappled streetscapes and architectural landmarks through line rather than color, and *Old Dominy House* does so with particular authority. It speaks to the collector drawn to American history as much as American art — to those who
