Description: city; outdoor; people; transportation; night; costume/uniform
Label Text: Childe Hassam is perhaps the best-known American Impressionist, who imported the contemporary Parisian painting style of Impressionism to the United States. Hassam made New York City the center of his operations in the late 1880s and 1890s, and painted pictures of life in New York. Hassam, like the Impressionist artists he was inspired by, desired to show scenes of daily life from his vantage point as an artist. In Cab Stand at Night, Madison Square, Hassam depicts a cab stand lit up by new electric lights. The use of lights and shadows, together with its loose brushstroke, shows Hassam’s training and interest in French Impressionism, but his choice of scene, a New York cab stand, shows his distinctively American eye. All is not what it seems in this picture, however, as some have suggested that the lone woman in the gray coat walking along the sidewalk is, in fact, a prostitute. Hassam endeavored to show his subject as it appeared to him, in its entirety. Like other works in this gallery, such as George Bellows’s Pennsylvania Excavation and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana of the Tower, Hassam’s painting is located in the Tenderloin neighborhood of Manhattan.
Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1934.3.2 |