Return to Top Works Homepage


CHILDE HASSAM
(American, 1859-1935)
Street Corner with Carriage and Crowd, 1888
Oil on wood (cigar box cover)
7 5/8 x 4 3/4"
Purchase: The Herman Lee and Nell Stuart Donovan Memorial Endowment and the University of Kentucky Annual Giving Fund 1979.28

American painter and printmaker Childe Hassam was raised in Massachusetts. He was initially trained as an apprentice to a wood engraver, and he took evening classes at the Boston Art Club. He made his first trip to Europe in 1883, but it was not until 1886 and his three-year stint of art study in Paris, which included drawing lessons at the Académie Julian, that his attraction to the work of the Impressionists encouraged him to develop a looser brushstroke and to heighten his portrayal of light and color; throughout his career, however, Hassam’s paintings would nonetheless convey a sense of solidity and form. Hassam was the leading exponent of Impressionist painting in America and one of the founding members of The Ten, a group of American Impressionists that included John Twachtman, Julian Alden Weir, and Willard Leroy Metcalf. Despite being labeled an Impressionist, Hassam referred to himself as a painter of light and air. This painting, which depicts a winter scene of a city street corner, dates to the artist’s Parisian period; although the specific location is unidentified, aspects of the view recall the Boulevard de Clichy. The casual immediacy of the scene—a busy corner viewed from a high vantage point, as if from a fifth story window—is enhanced by the artist’s impromptu use of a cigar box cover as the support for his painting.