Our Winter Art Show

By the time he painted Windy Day in 1895, the Massachusetts-born Childe Hassam had already made the move—near-mandatory for American artists—to New York City. But this picture is of Boston, where he began his career turning out sketches for the newspapers, like so many painters of his day. Hassam was among the most successful of the American impressionists: when he died in 1935, The New York Times cited a critic who thought Hassam had “succeeded in doing oftener and better what Monet had tried to do with color.” In fact, much of Hassam’s work is not nearly so free and engaging as this little oil sketch, which, with its determined pedestrians and its clouds of steam pumping into the winter sky, could be any American industrial city in the virile years just before the century’s turn.