“To me New York is the most beautiful city in the world”
Childe Hassam trained as a watercolorist and illustrator in his home state of Massachusetts before moving to Paris to study at the illustrious Académie Julian in 1886. After three years in Paris, Hassam returned to America deeply committed to the principles of Impressionism with an affinity for capturing the visual language of urban life. “I never had any desire to remain permanently on the other side. America represented to me the highest opportunity,” he explained of the decision to return home, in spite of how fruitful his studies abroad had proved (quoted in John Kimberly Mumford, “Who’s Who in New York,” New York Herald Tribune, 30 August 1925, p. 3). Settling permanently in New York in 1889, Hassam set out to illustrate his impressions of the Manhattan skyline, streets, and parks through vivid color and delicately applied brushstrokes.
Establishing residence at 95 Fifth Avenue, Hassam situated his studio between two of the city’s cultural focal points: Union Square and Madison Square Park (see figs. 1 and 2). Dated 1890, within a year of his arrival, View of Broadway and Fifth Avenue perfectly encapsulates the grandeur and excit.mes nt of Hassam’s New York pictures. Hassam often opted for higher vantage points in order to capture street-level subjects, as is the case in the present composition. Seated on a balcony at the Hotel Bartholdi on the southeast corner of Broadway and Twenty Third, he records an expansive yet detailed perspective of his surroundings (H. Barbara Weinberg, Childe Hassam American Impressionist, New York, 2004, p. 99).
Right: Fig. 2 Childe Hassam, Spring Morning in the Heart of the City, 1890; reworked in 1895-99. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Light blue hydrangeas adorn the balcony, offering a striking pop of color that resonates with the deep blue of the expansive sky. “I suppose a great many people think my pictures are too blue,” Hassam once remarked; “this blue that I see in the atmosphere is beautiful, because it is one of the conditions of this wonderful nature all about us” (A.E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur, 17 October 1892, p. 116). Red umbrellas effortlessly cascade along the facade of the building at far right, drawing the viewer’s attention toward the beaming Victoria Hotel at center. A contemporary of Hassam’s remarked that Fifth Avenue at this t.mes was a “a study in progressive sociology with mansions and factories, libraries, museums, vacant lots, hospitals, parks, and slums” (Simon Strunsky, “The Lane that Has No Turning,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1915, p. 490). In the present painting, Hassam clearly denotes Fifth Avenue as the epicenter of tourism, entertainment, and culture.
Hotel Victoria, circa 1895. Photographer unknown. 
The General Worth Monument, an obelisk dedicated to Major General WIlliam Jenkins Worth, hero of the Mexican War. 
Fifth Avenue at 26th Street, 1896. Photographer unknown. 
Hassam would continue to adorn facades with bright motifs once he initiated his flag series in the 1910s.
Childe Hassam, Allies Day, May 1917, 1917. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
“He gives you the color of the streets and the tone of the city”
Hassam’s portraits of New York are bustling and lively, illustrated in a manner that is enticing and flattering. In the decade that followed, Hassam produced more than fifty paintings, watercolors and pastels of the New York cityscape. “His scenes of Fifth Avenue evoke the era when promenading along that thoroughfare was the height of fashionable custom,” curator Ulrich W. Hiesinger explains (Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Childe Hassam American Impressionist, New York, 1994, p. 66). His depictions of New York celebrate the vibrancy of the people and architecture surrounding him, which is extremely reminiscent of Camille Pissarro and the work of his French counterparts. However indebted Hassam is to his t.mes in Paris, in many ways his illustrations of Manhattan are quite original. For instance, his execution of the present work predates Pissarro’s The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning by seven years (1897, see fig. 3). Hassam’s perception and subsequent renditions of New York were therefore in vogue for the period, keeping up with Impressionist trends of capturing fleeting moments of urban life and passersby. When considered alongside an earlier Impressionist masterpiece such as Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines (1873-74, see fig. 4), it is clear that while Hassam’s New York subjects are inventive and express an enthusiasm for the American cityscape, there is simultaneously a resonance between his American pictures and the broader, global trajectory of Impressionism. Examined in concert with one another, Monet, Hassam and Pissarro’s masterworks all share a concern for aerial perspectives, architectural detail, and representing the fast paced nature of city living.
Center: Lot 14. Childe Hassam, View of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, 1890.
Right: Fig. 3 Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning, 1897. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Although Hassam painted in Boston, New York, Paris, Gloucester, and East Hampton over the course of his longstanding artistic career, his New York oils are the most commercially successful at auction. View of Broadway and Fifth Avenue is one of Hassam's most successful privately owned New York subjects from this period, and has remained in private hands since 1988 when it last appeared at auction.