Frühlingsmorgen im Herzen der Stadt

Childe Hassam had just come back from three years in Paris, where he had absorbed the Impressionists, and in 1890 he set about doing for New York what Monet and his circle had done for the French capital, painting the modern street as weather and light and moving crowds. This view looks down Fifth Avenue near Madison Square on a damp spring morning. Hassam later said he wanted the composition to radiate out from the cluster of hansom cabs in the foreground and fade toward the edges. At the left, under a classical portico, stands the old Fifth Avenue Hotel with its big round clock. He kept reworking the canvas through the 1890s, softening the wet grey air hanging over the traffic.