PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – American Impressionist Childe Hassam called himself the “Marco Polo” of the art world. He traveled extensively in the late 1800s and early 1900s – painting the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire, street scenes in New York, Paris, and Boston, the Snake River in Idaho, and San Francisco Bay.

He is best known for cross-sections of city life: pedestrians clad in black, horse-drawn buses and rainy skies. And he is famous for a series of American flag paintings, one of which, “Avenue in the Rain,” hangs in the White House, in a room adjoining the Oval Office.

A new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum focuses on a little-known aspect of Hassam’s work: Impressionist renderings of princely peaks, stormy bays, frothy shores and big-skied deserts in the Pacific Northwest.

H. Barbara Weinberg, curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, said Hassam painted the West because he had a curiosity about the world, sought adventure and was always looking for new marketing opportunities.

“He may have perceived an opportunity to open up a new market for his work in the Pacific Northwest as well as in California,” Weinberg said. “He was a very savvy, very multifaceted man of the world.”

In a photo taken in the Harney Desert along the desolate Oregon/Idaho border, a shirtless, barrel-chested Hassam paints contentedly in long shorts surrounded by shoulder-high rabbitbrush and sage brush.

Hassam lived in crude camp conditions in the desert, invigorated by the open sky and ever-changing light.

Altogether Hassam finished about 80 paintings in the Northwest – many of them landscapes, but also portraits and still-lifes, said associate curator of the Portland Art Museum, Margaret Bullock.

Bullock said it took a year and half for her to locate 38 Northwest paintings by Hassam. They weren’t that popular when they were painted, and they seemed to just disappear after they were sold, she said.

A century after Hassam painted the works, Bullock is seeing them turn up as far away as Athens, Greece.

“A lot of them are passed down through families, and the families have scattered,” Bullock said.

Anyone who has ever visited or lived in the Northwest will see at once that Hassam was a master of atmospheric effect.

His watercolors capture emotion, weather, and place.

Hassam varied brush stroke size and his color palette to show the region’s ever mutable forms.

“That is one of Hassam’s trademarks, how he changes his technique,” Bullock said.

Hassam started out as a watercolor artist and lithographer and then adopted oil painting as well. His early oil paintings lacked clarity and veered into muddiness, Bullock said.

He moved to Paris to study art, since there were few art schools in the United States.

Hassam landed in Paris at the tail-end of the Impressionist movement, and even rented a room that was occupied by Renoir just before Hassam arrived, Bullock said. He studied in France for three years and returned to the United States just as people in this country were starting to become aware of Impressionism.

Hassam’s painting method was compared to that of Monet’s, and he was often called the “American Monet,” but that “drove him crazy,” Bullock said.

He may have been compared to Monet not because they had similar techniques, but because in the United States at that time Monet was one of the more well-known French Impressionists, she said.

“He liked to claim that he wasn’t influenced by French Impressionists at all,” she said.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art featured Hassam in a show of American Impressionists about six months ago.

“We argued that he is really the leader of American Impressionism,” Weinberg. “He was the only American of the many, many, many who studied in Paris, who really connected with French Impressionism during his student years.”

He may have connected, but when Hassam returned home he worked hard with other artists to create a uniquely American Impressionist movement – and succeeded. American Impressionists of the time, generally, did not transform their subject as much as French Impressionists did: realism mingles with the Impressionistic style, allowing a clear face or an angular line to be glimpsed.

“You look at a Monet, and sometimes all he’s painting is light, and you don’t see that so much in American paintings,” Bullock said.

Hassam and other artists created a group called “Ten American Painters,” and they did exhibitions and interviews together.

Hassam’s name became synonymous with the beginning of Impressionism in America along with painters J. Alden Weir, John H. Twachtman and Mary Cassatt.

Hassam made two trips to Oregon at the invitation of Oregon lawyer, art champion and renaissance man Charles Erskine Scott Wood. He also visited Washington state, California and Idaho.

Hassam loved the West, and when he returned to the East Coast he boasted of his pioneering painting adventures.

“He liked to convey that he was a rugged guy and he liked to say he was the first person to paint the Harney Desert,” said Bullock. “That’s not completely true, but he especially loved that area.”

AP-ES-01-08-05 0930EST