Winter in Union Square

Childe Hassam had just come home from three years studying in Paris when he painted this in 1890. Instead of returning to Boston, where he was from, he settled in New York, taking a studio near Union Square, and the snowbound square became one of his favourite subjects. He looked down on it here from a high window on Seventeenth Street, a block from his studio, watching the snow soften the traffic and the buildings into a grey blur. Off to the south you can make out the pale spire of Grace Church rising through the storm. Hassam liked these busy hubs best when the weather quieted them, the carriages and crowds reduced to dark specks in the white.