Over the Great Divide

Hassam started out cutting wood blocks for Boston publishers and illustrating magazines, which is a useful thing to know when looking at his compositions. He had a commercial illustrator’s instinct for where to put the eye. Three years in Paris in the late 1880s did the rest. He came back painting wet pavements, carriages, crowds seen from an upper window, weather. New York and Boston in the rain suited him better than anything pastoral. In 1898 he left the Society of American Artists with nine others and exhibited independently as the Ten American Painters, a quiet secession that shaped how American Impressionism was seen for the next twenty years. The flag paintings came late. Between 1916 and 1919 he painted around thirty views of Fifth Avenue hung with Allied banners, and those are the pictures he is best remembered for, though they are not necessarily his best.