Tanagra (The Builders, New York)

The title names two things, and Childe Hassam painted both in 1918. Tanagra is the statuette the young woman holds up to the light, a small ancient Greek terracotta of the kind named after the town in Boeotia where they were dug up in large numbers in the 1870s. After that they became a fashionable thing to collect in Europe and America. The builders are outside, beyond the curtain, where a tall new building is rising over the street. Hassam wrote that the woman was meant to symbolise growth, the growth of a great city. The room around her adds more borrowed heritage, a gilded folding screen and Chinese lilies on the windowsill. The Smithsonian's own label reads the picture more uneasily, as a refined, sheltered life in a year when the war and the noise of a new century were already pressing in on it. The canvas reached the museum in 1929, in the gift of the collector John Gellatly.