Grand Prix Day

This oil painting was produced by Childe Hassam in 1887. The key concern of the artist in this piece was to display bright light, and its impact on the objects found within the composition.

Grand Prix Day is sized at 61.28 x 78.74 cm and it is believed that Hassam produced another fairly similar piece in the same year which focused on the same event. The location for this content is the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, where local Parisians would celebrate a major horse race known as Le Jour du Grand Prix. It was a reflection on the life of the middle classes who could afford to enjoy leisure time, at a time when most could not. Many artists would capture the social lives of this growing section of society who were beginning to enjoy holidays, sports and shopping across the more affluent parts of Europe. Paris was also highly advanced culturally, helping to encourage many of the world's best artists to come here and study events such as this. Hassam was very much a Francophile and needed little encouragement to return to the country which had insired so much of his technical methods.

He took the best that France had to offer and combined it with content that was specific to his own country, and created a winning formula which led to many profitable sales of his work across a number of decades. Within Grand Prix Day we find rows of horses leading off into the distance, amid a sun drenched scene which is predominantly filled in the foreground by a well established road. A tall building comes in from the left hand side to provide a vertical balance, with a large mansion then displayed across the top right in the hills. It is surrounded by a dense forest or park which brings dark green tones into the painting. In the bottom right of the scene Hassam chooses to add a touch of shadow to give the impression of trees overhanging himself as he paints and to break up some of the flat brown tones of the road in front of him.

Childe Hassam took on many of the same subjects as used by the French Impressionists, and race meetings in France would be one of those. In this case he chooses a street setting which gives a different atmosphere entirely, with much less control over where things might head as he started to compose his work. Other common themes that he also imported into his career including scenes of domestic gardens, cityscapes and tranquil rural retreats and each one was impacted by choices over weather, season and location. Hassam managed to forge his own path and create a strand of Impressionism with an American twist although within this painting, of course, he is displaying his strong affection for the French nation instead.