Quai de St. Michel

By the spring of 1888 the American painter Childe Hassam had stopped going to the Académie Julian, the busy Paris studio where foreign students drilled at drawing, and was working entirely on his own. He was partway through a three-year stay in the city, and the change shows here in the loosened brush and brighter notes of colour. The place is the Quai Saint-Michel, on the Left Bank of the Seine, a short walk from Notre-Dame, where open-air sellers kept their stalls of secondhand books along the river. At the centre a well-dressed young woman leans over a portable bookstall in kidskin gloves and a feathered hat, while the older seller sits beside her, knitting, her face and worn shawl a plain measure of the distance between them. Within a year Hassam was back in the United States, where he became the country's leading Impressionist, best known later for streets of New York hung with flags.