Late Afternoon, New York, Winter

Late Afternoon, New York, Winter is a painting by Childe Hassam which can be found in the Brooklyn Museum in New York, USA. This charming piece captures many key element of the Impressionist artistic style.

The effect of seasonality and weather more specifically was an important tool to the Impressionists who would study how a particular scene would change over time. Monet was most famous for this with several series which studied haystacks, water lilies and various items of architecture and Hassam would use these ideas within his own career. He adored the big city life within the US and found it charming all year round. Snow seemed a favourite of his and he would feature New York and Boston within snow covered scenes that offered an alternative atmosphere to these busy locations. In the example of this painting, the snow appears so strong and dense that relatively little of the location can actually be seen, where as in other cases the snow would have stopped and the details would be much clearer. We can make out a number of cars making their way up and down the avenue, plus some slim trees whose vegetation has disappeared for the winter months.

Several large buildings in the background are reduced to darker sections of paint, and devoid of great detail due to the storm of snow which now falls. Most of the locals have decided to stay indoors, and so we just see a few figures dotted about in this painting, holding up umbrellas to counter the conditions. Hassam completed Late Afternoon, New York, Winter in the year 1900, at which point he would have been in his early 40s. This piece is sized at 93.8 x 73.7 cm which is a fairly standard size for the Impressionists. Another who might have influenced his work was James Whistler, an American who spent much of his life in Europe. He produced many cityscapes such as this where detail is very subtle and nature takes over to a certain degree. The use of snow in a dominant fashion allows an artist to reduce his palette substantially.

It was specifically a blue cover which spreads across this piece, and there are actually touches of pink and yellow which can be seen in the original piece. The artist used long brushstrokes to build a sense of activity within his paintings and this approach was particularly well suited to his cityscapes. With a reduced use of colour here, variation comes from the lighting and so with this scene the artist had to pay particularly close attention to the points in the composition where more light was showing through the snow storm. He would return to these locations in summer to offer us alternative views of the same spot and loved to compare the varying impacts of nature upon the human-built world.