Childe Hassam 1859 - 1935

Milch Galleries, New York
Mrs. Charles L. Buchanan, New York, until the 1980s (acquired from the above)
ACA Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, circa 1985-86

New York, The Jordan Volpe Gallery, Childe Hassam: American Impressionist, May-July 1994, p. 131, illustrated fig. 146 (as Winter Morning on Broadway)

This work is in very good condition. The canvas is lined. Under UV: There is one small spot of inpainting in the lower left corner.
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In December 1889, after returning home from a three year stay in Paris, Childe Hassam left his hometown of Boston where he had previously established himself as an artist and settled with his wife in New York City, considered at that time to be America’s burgeoning artistic and cultural epicenter. "To me it is the most wonderful and most beautiful city in the world," Hassam exclaimed of Manhattan, continuing, "All life is in it...no street, no section of Paris or any other city I have seen is equal to New York" (Barbara Weinberg, Childe Hassam: American Impressionist, New York, 2004, p. 87). Fascinated by the energy and unique character of the bustling metropolis, Hassam utilized the city’s streets, parks and people as subjects for his oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels. As Barbara Weinberg notes, "Using the candid compositions, rapid strokes, and varied palettes with which he had experimented in Boston and Paris, Hassam would produce unprecedented impressions of the city's thoroughfares, parks, and skylines" (Weinberg, p. 87). Almost immediately, Hassam received acclaim for his exceptional New York scenes; he was described by a leading critic of the day as a "street painter par excellence."

Painted in 1904, Winter, New York depicts a busy Manhattan boulevard on a winter’s day, lined with buildings and storefronts, filled with pedestrians bundled up against the frigid weather and crowded with carriages riding in both directions. The horse-drawn carriage, a recurrent motif in Hassam’s city views, is used here to emphasize the persistent motion found in the city streets. The man driving the carriage towards the viewer in this composition also "epitomizes Hassam's method of using a solitary 'leading' figure to mark the visual entry point of his compositions. Hassam...[likens] the portrait of a city to that of a person [and strives] to capture 'not only the superficial resemblance, but the inner self. The spirit...the soul of a city'" (Weinberg, p. 65). In addition to this motif, Hassam used a free spirited brushwork and unprecedented spontaneity to capture the life of New York City, with a specific concern for color, light, and atmosphere.

The present work references both the restrained color palette of similar tones found in Hassam's earlier Boston scenes as well as the diagonal, expansive compositions found in his Parisian cityscapes. All contours are softened and details are minimized, rendered with dashes of brushstrokes that evoke the haziness of snowy and icy winter weather, and the figures and structures towards the background appear as silhouettes against a foggy, atmospheric sky. The cool tones of blue-black and deep green provide dynamic contrasts to the snow covered street composed with lively strokes of white pigment. This expressive application of paint helps to further emphasize the sense of active motion the artist strives to convey in almost all of his portrayals of city life.