CHILDE HASSAM, Promenade-Winter New York

Private Collection (sold: Parke Bernet Galleries, New York, January 19, 1939, lot 21)
Macbeth Gallery, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Mrs. Ruth Woods Dayton, West Virginia, 1939
Daywood Art Gallery, Lewisburg, West Virginia (gift from the above)
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1963
Private Collection, Beverly Hills, California, 1963
Spanierman Gallery, New York, 1987
Acquired from the above, 1987

In December of 1889, after a two year stay in Paris, Childe Hassam decided to leave Boston and settle in New York, the city now considered America’s burgeoning artistic and cultural epicenter. Fascinated with its energy and unique character, New York became Hassam’s principal subject for works in all mediums.  H. Barbara Weinberg notes, “Using the candid compositions, rapid stroke, and varied palettes with which he had experimented in Boston and Paris, Hassam would produce unprecedented impressions of the city’s thoroughfares, parks, and skyline” (Childe Hassam: American Impressionist, New York, 2004, p.87).  Hassam received immediate acclaim for his New York street scenes and was dubbed “street painter par excellence” by a leading critic of the day.

Promenade-Winter New York, painted in 1895, features a well-dressed woman making her way down a wide snowy sidewalk in Manhattan on a gray wintry day. Her umbrella is closed at her side as she delicately holds one edge of her skirt above the wet snow. A group of fellow pedestrians out for a walk can be seen down the street behind her. Hassam’s figures appear as silhouettes against the foggy, atmospheric ground - like dark shadows rendered in blue-blacks and deep greens. All edges are softened, even the trees and buildings are blurred, visually muffled by the quick dashes of the brushstroke evoking the quiet blanket of the snow.  It is a work which references both Hassam’s reduced, tonalist palette of his earlier Boston scenes and the diagonal, expansive compositions of his Parisian cityscapes.  In 1892 Hassam wrote, “…I wait until I see picturesque groups, and those that compose well in relation to the whole” (Childe Hassam: American Impressionist, p.93).  The woman in the foreground of the composition  “epitomizes Hassam’s method of using a solitary ‘leading’ figure to mark the visual entry point of his compositions …Hassam...likened the portrait of a city to that of a person, with the artist striving to capture ‘not only the superficial resemblance, but the inner self.  The spirit…the soul of a city’” (Childe Hassam: American Impressionist, p.34).