Rainy Day, Boston #6

by Eric Glaser

Title

Rainy Day, Boston #6

Artist

Eric Glaser

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

"Rainy Day, Boston"

Artist: Childe Hassam (American, 1859-1935)

Title: Rainy Day, Boston

Object Type: Painting

Date: 1885

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Place Depicted: Boston, Massachusetts, United States, North America

Dimensions: Height: 663 mm (26.10 in); Width: 1,220 mm (48.03 in)

Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott

Collection: Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, USA

Current Location: Toledo Museum of Art (2445 Monroe Street), Gallery, 30B

Label Text:

“I am never tired of observing [people] in every-day life…. Humanity in motion is a constant study to me.”

--Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam was an American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums. He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.

Painted at a time when urban landscapes were still a novel subject in the United States, Rainy Day, Boston depicts the intersection of Columbus Avenue and Appleton Street in Boston's South End. When Childe Hassam painted this picture, he and his wife lived at 282 Columbus Avenue. According to the artist, "The street was all paved in asphalt, and I used to think it very pretty when it was wet and shining, and caught the reflections of passing people and vehicles." In this view seen through the atmospheric filter of rain, Hassam accentuated the pictorial effects produced by the light and the weather conditions. Rain causes the broad expanse of pavement to glisten with reflections and casts a soft rosy tone over the damp red bricks. The overcast sky and pearly light produce a misty atmosphere that enshrouds buildings and pedestrians alike, and—combined with the muted palette of dull pinks, grays, and blacks—unifies the composition.

Rainy Day, Boston also celebrates Boston's fashionable, clean, and spacious cityscape. Hassam had been to Europe in 1883 and had seen the new appearance of Paris with its wide boulevards created by Baron Haussmann for Napoleon III. This painting's wide angle of vision, uncluttered setting, and deep perspective recall Haussmann's municipal improvements, which had inspired Boston's own concurrent developments in the 1860s and 1870s. They also suggest the influence of photography, still relatively new. Hassam's interest in showing the effects of weather and the subject of city life with its to-and-fro bustle indicate that here, in his first major oil painting, he was trying out for an American audience the modern urban theme so embraced by the French Impressionists that he had encountered in Paris.

Text Credit: Toledo Museum of Art

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Additional image editing by Eric Glaser

Uploaded

May 23rd, 2020

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