Childe Hassam (1859–1935)

CHILDE HASSAM (1859–1935)
Sunset, A City Street (Sunset in the City), c. 1890
Watercolor on paper, 7 7/8 x 10 1/2 in.
Signed (at lower right): ‘Childe Hassam

RECORDED: “About the Studios, Water Color Exhibition at the Art Institute,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), April 8, 1894, p. 31 // (possibly) “The Water-Color Society: A Typical Exhibition of the Most Popular Art of the Day,” New York Times, February 3, 1894, p. 2, as “Sunset in the City”

EXHIBITED: (possibly) American Water Color Society, New York, February 5–March 3, 1894, 27th Annual Exhibition, no. 279, as “Sunset in the City” // Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, April 3–May 6, 1894, Sixth Annual Exhibition of Water Colors, April 3-May 6, 1894, no. 115, as “Sunset, A City Street” 

EX COLL.: the artist; to [Macbeth Gallery, New York]; Frederick William French (1842–1900), Boston, 1890s; to his nephew, Allen French, Concord, Massachusetts, until 1946; to his wife, Alatta Lillibridge French, Concord, Massachusetts, 1946–64; to Allen French’s daughter, Maude Dorrance French, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1964–1985; to her grandson, 1985 until the present

Sunset, A City Street provides us with a glimpse of Fifth Avenue looking south down the west side of the avenue between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets at the close of the day. As in his earlier portrayals of Boston and Paris, Hassam conceived the thoroughfare as a slanting diagonal that leads the spectator’s gaze past the elegantly dressed pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages on the left to a stretch of low-rise buildings bordering the First Presbyterian Church of New York on the right. Situated at 48 Fifth Avenue, the church was erected during 1844–46 after a design by the English-born architect Joseph C. Wells (1814–1860). Often referred to as “Old First,” it boasted a distinctive Gothic Revival-style spire (based on that of Magdalen College at Oxford) which in Hassam’s painting is silhouetted against a resplendent sunset sky.

Like some of Hassam’s smaller Parisian vignettes, Sunset, A City Street is rendered in an improvisatory manner, which gives it an aspect of an on-the-spot sketch, thereby suggesting that he may have painted it with the thought of working it up into a larger composition. 

Hassam’s expertise in manipulating this difficult medium is readily apparent in Sunset, A City Street, wherein the artist defines his subject by means of broad washes of color—primarily muted shades of yellow-gold and dark earth tones which are offset by the dazzling touches of pink and orange in the sky—that impart a gentle lyricism to the image. Not surprisingly, when Sunset, A City Street was shown with three other works at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1894, a commentator for The Inter Ocean noted that Hassam “excels in city street scenes” and observed, as well, that, although the exhibition as a whole was not “luminous,” Hassam’s “pictures can hardly be classed as anything else, and they are always beautiful.”