Rainy Midnight

Rainy Midnight perfectly captures key elements of the Impressionist movement. Hassam would combine its signature features with items unique to the US to forge his own offshoot which eventually became a part of the American Impressionists. This piece can today be found at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

We find in front of us here a vehicle making its way through a rainy street. Street lamps on its left hand side glow brightly, leaving a trail of light which stretches down the canvas. The street itself is covered in rain water, helping to reflect this unnatural light around the rest of the scene. To the right hand side we find tall buildings and trees merged together in a dark mass of paint. Little can really be spotted here, but suggestion is enough, particularly for those familiar with this artist's work. He would often feature busy streets full of hustle and bustle but in the example of Rainy Midnight, we find that most people have stayed inside to avoid the heavy rain. Hassam loved to study the changing light and weather and often captured the same locations under a variety of different conditions, just as the European Impressionists had done several decades earlier. He took in many of their ideas, but added unique touches for his own taste to help form the American Impressionist movement.

The artist produced many cityscapes within his career, but also regularly travelled to more rural areas from where he could capture natural settings. He continued to work hard throughout his lifetime and left behind a huge body of work by the end of his career. Hassam was talented in making money from his career, which is not a skill that many artists seem to have. He produced prints from his originals which also helped to bring in more money as well as spreading his reputation further and wider. His travels including many domestic locations as well as to Europe every once in a while and he loved both regions passionately. Rainy Midnight is a good example of his combination of weather with city life and how he could create very different moods from much the same part of each city. Perspective is clear within this piece, as angles head towards a meeting point in the top left of the piece.

Today, Hassam is rightly regarded as one of the most important American painters and played a key role in selling the Impressionist vision to the public. From that point onwards he could sell art relatively easily and started to command high valuations for his work once his career entered its mature period. This also led to French Impressionist art being demanded by curators in the US too, which explains why so many of the original pieces can be found there today. This was an artist who managed to fuse a foreign-born style with local content and the formula proved incredibly popular during his lifetime, and for years after.