Spring on West 78th Street

Childe Hassam was America's great painter of the modern city, and he made this New York street scene in 1905. It is an ordinary spring afternoon on the Upper West Side, the young trees just coming into leaf. Look at the traffic and you catch the exact moment the city was living through, horse-drawn carriages still sharing the street with a few of the first motorcars, a changeover that would be all but complete within about 15 years. Hassam had spent time in Paris in the late 1880s and brought the loose, light-filled Impressionist touch home with him. He turned it here on his own city, softening the hard new avenues into a haze of pale sun and fresh green.