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His images were hardly unappreciated: in one good year, he made $100,000 from his works. The burly artist bought a 17th century house in East Hampton, L.I., settled in the painterly light that has drawn artists to the region for 150 years. An impressive figure even in later life, he would daily stalk across the dunes in a 200-year-old Chinese robe, fling it off, and plunge into the surf. Occasionally, Hassam even departed from pragmatism, painting such fantasies as Adam and Eve Walking Out on Montauk Point in Early Spring. Whereas Monet in his old age quietly painted his water lilies, the American impressionist traced the rustic tranquillity of the Hamptons' shingled cottages, windmills, and seacoast up to the day he died in 1935.