L'Avenue sous la pluie

Childe Hassam painted this in February 1917, a rainy day on Fifth Avenue in New York, the wet street doubling every flag in its reflection. The flags were not decoration for its own sake. The United States was weeks from entering the First World War, and patriotic parades had draped the avenue in stars and stripes. Hassam, an American Impressionist who had studied the shimmer of Paris streets, made about 30 of these flag paintings between 1916 and 1919. Here the downpour smears the banners into loose vertical strokes of red, white and blue. The canvas entered the White House collection in 1963, and for decades presidents of both parties have hung it in the Oval Office.