Grand Prix Day

"I am painting sunlight," Childe Hassam wrote from Paris in November 1887 to his friend Rose Lamb, a Boston painter, and he went on to describe a four-in-hand coach and crowds of cabs filled with well-dressed women on their way to the Grand Prix. The Grand Prix de Paris was the great horse race of the season, run each June at Longchamp, in the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of the city. This canvas probably shows the chestnut-lined avenue that led out to the park, then the avenue du Bois de Boulogne and since 1929 the avenue Foch, with the Arc de Triomphe partly visible at the left. For Hassam it marked a change of palette. Until then he had worked in darker, more tonal colour, and here he moved to light, bright colour that holds the glare of a summer day. He painted a second, larger version, Le Jour du Grand Prix, for the Salon of 1888, and that one now belongs to the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut.