[4] The majority of Hassam's California etchings were first exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1927.
Even though the works of the French Impressionists were first popularized in California by San Francisco art galleries in the 1890s, and had their first major public exhibition at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in 1915, just several years after New York's Armory Show,[6] artists in Northern California remained strongly attached to the style of tonalism, not Impressionism.
[7] Several California artists found inspiration in Hassam's work and painted similar scenes in the Bay Area.
Plein-air artists Maurice Logan (1886–1977) and Selden Connor Gile (1877–1947), both members of the Society of Six, later painted works featuring hills in the Bay Area that are reminiscent of Hassam's treatment of similar landforms.
In 2002, South observed that large Impressionist exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and retrospectives of American modernism all ignored California-based artists.