Rigger's Shop, Provincetown, MA

Childe Hassam's 1900 painting of the Rigger's Shop in Provincetown, Massachusetts documents the maritime working culture of the historic Cape Cod fishing and whaling port at the moment when Provincetown was beginning its transformation from fishing community to artists' colony. A rigger's shop — where ship's rigging was made and repaired — represents the genuine working life of a New England maritime town, and Hassam's choice to paint it alongside his more celebrated coastal scenes reflects his broader interest in the human environment of the New England coast. Provincetown would become a major center of American avant-garde art by the 1910s, and Hassam's 1900 visit documents its pre-artist-colony character.

The interior working space of the rigger's shop is handled with the cool, diffuse light typical of a New England workshop — light entering from windows illuminating ropes, tools, and the structural elements of the building's interior. The brushwork is direct and descriptive, the American Impressionist manner applied with care to an unusual industrial interior subject.