Lot Essay
RELATED WORKS:
Fifth Avenue in Winter, circa 1890, oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 28in. (54.9 x 71.1cm.), The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Messenger Boy, 1903, oil on canvas, 18 x 32in. (45.7 x 81.3cm.), Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island
RELATED LITERATURE:
U.W. Hiesinger, Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, New York, 1994, p. 128
Childe Hassam's paintings of New York rank among the most important images of American Impressionism. Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York is a striking and interesting example of Hassam's winter cityscapes possessing many of the artist's most celebrated motifs. In this snowy street scene which relates to Fifth Avenue in Winter of circa 1890, (figure a) Hassam displays his interest in depicting the soul of the city and reveals a nostalgia for his earlier beloved neighborhood around lower Fifth Avenue. In Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York, Hassam successfully captures a sense of the street life of Fifth Avenue with his masterful impressionist brushwork but here chooses to focus on a solitary messenger boy rather than covering an expansive and all-encompassing city view.
Childe Hassam began painting cityscapes as early as 1885 having moved into the city of Boston just following his marriage to Kathleen Maude Doan in February 1884. As Ulrich Hiesinger writes, "This fashionable west end district, created from marshland along the Charles River, was Boston's newest pride, a planned development of broad avenues lined with brownstone houses, interspersed with squares, churches, museums, libraries and parks...These new surroundings inspired a momentous change of direction in Hassam's paintings as, for the first time, he began to explore the subject of modern city life." (p. 21) Masterful cityscapes from these early years include Rainy Day, Boston (Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts) and A City Fairyland (Mr. and Mrs. Samuel P. Peabody) Both of these pictures display Hassam's interest in exploring various atmospheric conditions and their picturesque effects on the city streets. This concern for weather became a preoccupation of the artist as it enabled him to soften the cold, metallic edge of a city and alleviate the harsh and inhuman qualities of urban life.
During a three year stay in Paris between 1886-1889, Hassam continued his interest in urban life, painting scenes along the fashionable avenues capturing glimpses of the great French capital. Although his street scenes of Paris tend to focus on the comings and goings of the Parisian uppercrust, Hassam did introduce the activities of the working class into those images creating interesting juxtapositions of the social classes, as seen in Cab Station, Rue Bonaparte of 1887. Hassam's bustling city views of Paris are filled with horse drawn carriages, street side vendors and figures promenading cobblestone streets--fleeting moments described in quick, dashing brushstrokes. During these years Hassam was exposed to and influenced by the work of the French Impressionists specifically their depictions of contemporary urban life; however, Hassam exhibited in his work a very individual approach and style that was unmistakenly American.
In 1890 Hassam returned to America settling into a studio apartment at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. Recognizing the prominence of New York as an international art center, Hassam chose to reside in the bustling and fashionable city then centered around lower Fifth Avenue. Hassam was immediately struck by the extensive and varied array of subjects afforded by his new home. Impressed by the rich cultural and social life of New York, Hassam exclaimed, "the thoroughfares of the great French metropolis were not one whit more interesting than the streets of New York." (quoted in I.S. Fort's Childe Hassam's New York, New York, 1993, p. vi) Excited to explore the life and soul of the city, Hassam remarked, "There is nothing so interesting to me as people. I am never tired of observing them in everyday life, as they hurry through the streets on business or saunter down the promenade on pleasure." (quoted in A.E. Ives, "Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes," Art Amateur 27, October 1892, p. 116-117) By the turn of the century, Hassam was considered New York's "street painter par excellence," (quoted in S. Hartmann, "Art Talk," The Criterion, January 8, 1898, p. 17) having concentrated on capturing picturesque slices of life in what was becoming one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the world.
Although Hassam explored various areas of the city for subjects to paint, he routinely returned to the streets near his home on Lower Fifth Avenue. One of Hassam's earliest New York street scenes and his first painting to be purchased by a museum, Fifth Avenue in Winter depicts the bustling intersection of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. Painted from a window of Hassam's apartment, this picture depicts pedestrians trudging along snowy sidewalks, horse-drawn carriages sweeping up the avenue and a messenger boy approaching a corner who, as Ulrich Heisinger suggests, serves as a "solitary 'leading' figure to mark the visual entry point of his composition(s)." (Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, p. 65)
Fifth Avenue in Winter was one of Hassam's favorite pictures. Not only did he select it for several well-received exhibitions, he returned to it in 1907 for the subject of Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York. By 1892 Hassam had moved north to West 23rd Street and by 1903 he had relocated even further north to West 67th Street, reflecting the move of the heart of the city from lower Fifth Avenue to the area around Central Park. By 1907 lower Fifth Avenue had lost much of its cosmopolitan appeal and had become a grittier, more mundane area of the city. Hassam's decision to re-use elements from his 1890 work in Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York is an unusual but interesting departure in his oeuvre.
In Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York, Hassam has closed in on the single messenger boy who previously figured as a mere footnote in the immediate foreground of Fifth Avenue in New York. Here the focus has shifted from the packed avenue bursting with energy and life to a cold messenger boy making his way through the chilly city streets. Common street vendors have assumed the place of the teams of sprightly horses and well-clad dashing pedestrians. A quiet solemnness pervades the scene, once posh and up to the minute. Focusing his attention on the messenger boy, Hassam chose to depict a common and almost unnoteworthy moment; however; as Eliot Clark noted, "Hassam did not indulge in the sentimental aspect of squalor, or look with sympathetic gaze upon the picturesque life of the humble." (quoted in I.S. Fort, Childe Hassam's New York, p. viii). Although this work of 1907 bears some resemeblance to work of The Eight, it was rare that Hassam devoted an entire painting to "commonman types". This particular experiment in urban subject matter is more likely a result of Hassam's nostalgia for his old neighborhood than an association with any member of The Eight.
Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York is not the only work which relates to Fifth Avenue in Winter. Messenger Boy of 1903 "developed this theme in an independent, friezelike composition in which, as in other snow scenes painted over the next few years, the former sense of dash and vitality is replaced by a slow, even mournful tempo." (U. Heisinger, Childe Hassam, p. 128) Both of these pictures which deny the vertical growth and rapid industrialization of the city reveal Hassam's rejection of "the new dynamism and congestion of the city flooded with immigrants for a simpler, quiet place." (I.S. Fort, Childe Hassam's New York, p. viii) Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York suggests Hassam's acknowledgement of the anonymity and democratization of the transformed city, yet by positioning this familiar character on this familiar street corner, he illustrates his nostalgia for an era long gone. As Ilene Susan Fort writes, "History is always the course of events as perceived by the person telling the story. In Hassam's case, the transformation of America's premier metroplis was conveyed with enthusiasm, love and regret." (Childe Hassam's New York, p. xv)
This painting will be included in Stuart P. Feld's and Kathleen M. Burnside's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.
Fifth Avenue in Winter, circa 1890, oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 28in. (54.9 x 71.1cm.), The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Messenger Boy, 1903, oil on canvas, 18 x 32in. (45.7 x 81.3cm.), Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island
RELATED LITERATURE:
U.W. Hiesinger, Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, New York, 1994, p. 128
Childe Hassam's paintings of New York rank among the most important images of American Impressionism. Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York is a striking and interesting example of Hassam's winter cityscapes possessing many of the artist's most celebrated motifs. In this snowy street scene which relates to Fifth Avenue in Winter of circa 1890, (figure a) Hassam displays his interest in depicting the soul of the city and reveals a nostalgia for his earlier beloved neighborhood around lower Fifth Avenue. In Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York, Hassam successfully captures a sense of the street life of Fifth Avenue with his masterful impressionist brushwork but here chooses to focus on a solitary messenger boy rather than covering an expansive and all-encompassing city view.
Childe Hassam began painting cityscapes as early as 1885 having moved into the city of Boston just following his marriage to Kathleen Maude Doan in February 1884. As Ulrich Hiesinger writes, "This fashionable west end district, created from marshland along the Charles River, was Boston's newest pride, a planned development of broad avenues lined with brownstone houses, interspersed with squares, churches, museums, libraries and parks...These new surroundings inspired a momentous change of direction in Hassam's paintings as, for the first time, he began to explore the subject of modern city life." (p. 21) Masterful cityscapes from these early years include Rainy Day, Boston (Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts) and A City Fairyland (Mr. and Mrs. Samuel P. Peabody) Both of these pictures display Hassam's interest in exploring various atmospheric conditions and their picturesque effects on the city streets. This concern for weather became a preoccupation of the artist as it enabled him to soften the cold, metallic edge of a city and alleviate the harsh and inhuman qualities of urban life.
During a three year stay in Paris between 1886-1889, Hassam continued his interest in urban life, painting scenes along the fashionable avenues capturing glimpses of the great French capital. Although his street scenes of Paris tend to focus on the comings and goings of the Parisian uppercrust, Hassam did introduce the activities of the working class into those images creating interesting juxtapositions of the social classes, as seen in Cab Station, Rue Bonaparte of 1887. Hassam's bustling city views of Paris are filled with horse drawn carriages, street side vendors and figures promenading cobblestone streets--fleeting moments described in quick, dashing brushstrokes. During these years Hassam was exposed to and influenced by the work of the French Impressionists specifically their depictions of contemporary urban life; however, Hassam exhibited in his work a very individual approach and style that was unmistakenly American.
In 1890 Hassam returned to America settling into a studio apartment at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. Recognizing the prominence of New York as an international art center, Hassam chose to reside in the bustling and fashionable city then centered around lower Fifth Avenue. Hassam was immediately struck by the extensive and varied array of subjects afforded by his new home. Impressed by the rich cultural and social life of New York, Hassam exclaimed, "the thoroughfares of the great French metropolis were not one whit more interesting than the streets of New York." (quoted in I.S. Fort's Childe Hassam's New York, New York, 1993, p. vi) Excited to explore the life and soul of the city, Hassam remarked, "There is nothing so interesting to me as people. I am never tired of observing them in everyday life, as they hurry through the streets on business or saunter down the promenade on pleasure." (quoted in A.E. Ives, "Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes," Art Amateur 27, October 1892, p. 116-117) By the turn of the century, Hassam was considered New York's "street painter par excellence," (quoted in S. Hartmann, "Art Talk," The Criterion, January 8, 1898, p. 17) having concentrated on capturing picturesque slices of life in what was becoming one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the world.
Although Hassam explored various areas of the city for subjects to paint, he routinely returned to the streets near his home on Lower Fifth Avenue. One of Hassam's earliest New York street scenes and his first painting to be purchased by a museum, Fifth Avenue in Winter depicts the bustling intersection of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. Painted from a window of Hassam's apartment, this picture depicts pedestrians trudging along snowy sidewalks, horse-drawn carriages sweeping up the avenue and a messenger boy approaching a corner who, as Ulrich Heisinger suggests, serves as a "solitary 'leading' figure to mark the visual entry point of his composition(s)." (Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, p. 65)
Fifth Avenue in Winter was one of Hassam's favorite pictures. Not only did he select it for several well-received exhibitions, he returned to it in 1907 for the subject of Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York. By 1892 Hassam had moved north to West 23rd Street and by 1903 he had relocated even further north to West 67th Street, reflecting the move of the heart of the city from lower Fifth Avenue to the area around Central Park. By 1907 lower Fifth Avenue had lost much of its cosmopolitan appeal and had become a grittier, more mundane area of the city. Hassam's decision to re-use elements from his 1890 work in Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York is an unusual but interesting departure in his oeuvre.
In Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York, Hassam has closed in on the single messenger boy who previously figured as a mere footnote in the immediate foreground of Fifth Avenue in New York. Here the focus has shifted from the packed avenue bursting with energy and life to a cold messenger boy making his way through the chilly city streets. Common street vendors have assumed the place of the teams of sprightly horses and well-clad dashing pedestrians. A quiet solemnness pervades the scene, once posh and up to the minute. Focusing his attention on the messenger boy, Hassam chose to depict a common and almost unnoteworthy moment; however; as Eliot Clark noted, "Hassam did not indulge in the sentimental aspect of squalor, or look with sympathetic gaze upon the picturesque life of the humble." (quoted in I.S. Fort, Childe Hassam's New York, p. viii). Although this work of 1907 bears some resemeblance to work of The Eight, it was rare that Hassam devoted an entire painting to "commonman types". This particular experiment in urban subject matter is more likely a result of Hassam's nostalgia for his old neighborhood than an association with any member of The Eight.
Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York is not the only work which relates to Fifth Avenue in Winter. Messenger Boy of 1903 "developed this theme in an independent, friezelike composition in which, as in other snow scenes painted over the next few years, the former sense of dash and vitality is replaced by a slow, even mournful tempo." (U. Heisinger, Childe Hassam, p. 128) Both of these pictures which deny the vertical growth and rapid industrialization of the city reveal Hassam's rejection of "the new dynamism and congestion of the city flooded with immigrants for a simpler, quiet place." (I.S. Fort, Childe Hassam's New York, p. viii) Snow Storm, Fifth Avenue, New York suggests Hassam's acknowledgement of the anonymity and democratization of the transformed city, yet by positioning this familiar character on this familiar street corner, he illustrates his nostalgia for an era long gone. As Ilene Susan Fort writes, "History is always the course of events as perceived by the person telling the story. In Hassam's case, the transformation of America's premier metroplis was conveyed with enthusiasm, love and regret." (Childe Hassam's New York, p. xv)
This painting will be included in Stuart P. Feld's and Kathleen M. Burnside's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.