New York Street

Painted in 1902 and now at the Art Institute of Chicago, this view of a New York street belongs to Hassam's sustained documentation of Manhattan's urban life in the early years of the new century. His New York street scenes differ from his Isles of Shoals coastal paintings in their embrace of the city as a subject of beauty rather than merely utility—a position that required considerable artistic conviction in an American culture that still associated painting's highest aspirations with nature rather than the commercial city. The Art Institute's collection of his New York works makes it a key repository for this urban dimension of his career.

The street is treated as a spatial stage defined by building facades and animated by the movement of pedestrians and vehicles below. Hassam deploys a greyed urban palette—blue-whites, warm greys, ochre-yellows—that captures the diffused light of the city without the brilliance he reserved for coastal or garden subjects.