On view
Wilmerding Pavilion
Philip & Nancy Anschutz Gallery
Rainy Day, Fifth Avenue,
1916
More Context
Childe Hassam’s images of New York gentry sauntering through Washington Square Park or navigating a snowy evening on Union Square were inspired by the urban life outside his studio on lower Fifth Avenue. That grand thoroughfare, the city’s cultural and commercial artery, was also the main parade route for the nation. Hassam had a window onto the country’s increasing involvement in World War I when his studio moved further uptown, closer to the center of those patriotic displays. He recalled, "There was that Preparedness Day, and I looked up the avenue and saw these wonderful flags waving, and I painted the series of flag pictures after that." The flag-covered streets and Impressionist images of Bastille Day had captivated Hassam during his early days in Paris. An Impressionist concern with the effects of weather and light exhibited in the works he produced there and in his earlier New York canvases gave way to more formal explorations and symbolic undertones as his flag series progressed. Of the approximately thirty flag images the artist made between 1916 and 1919, <em>Rainy Day, Fifth Avenue</em> marks a pivotal turning point in this development. Rain provides a pretext to dissolve the canvas into a harmony of red, white, and blue, while the American flag becomes both a pattern and a parallel of the swarms of people below.
Information
1916
United States, New York, New York, Manhattan, Fifth Avenue
- F. J. Mather, "American paintings at Princeton University," Record of the Museum of Historic Art, Princeton University 2, no. 2 (1943): p. 2-15., pp. 11-12 (illus.)
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"Recent accessions", Record of the Museum of Historic Art, Princeton University 2, no. 1 (1943): p. 15.
, p. 15 - Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 79 (illus.)
- Barbara T. Ross, "The Mather years 1922-1946," in "An art museum for Princeton: the early years", special issue, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 55, no. 1/2 (1996): p. 53–76., p. 65, fig. 17
- John Wilmerding et al., American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum: volume 1: drawings and watercolors, (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 224, cat. no. 57; p. 225 (illus.); p. 339, checklist no. 837
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 265 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 317
