On the Lake Front Promenade, Columbian World Exposition

Childe Hassam chose a typical Impressionist subject when he composed On the Lakefront Promenade, Columbian World Exposition, depicting stylishly dressed visitors clutching their official fair guidebooks (the red booklets that several women are carrying). The painting exemplifies the artist’s dedication to the problems of plein-air painting he had studied in Paris, most notably his interest in capturing the effects of motion, color, and atmosphere in rainy or overcast weather. Hassam had mastered the techniques of Claude Monet (1840–1926) more successfully than most of his American contemporaries; his investigation of light on rippling water, his convincing suggestion of movement by means of assured and spirited brushwork, and his arrangements of figures and architecture in a sweeping urban space bring to mind precedents such as Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, Paris (1873) or Camille Pissarro’s (1830–1903) cityscapes of the 1890s. The prominent woman in the foreground of the Smart Museum’s picture, conveyed in motion with rapid brushstrokes, is a figural type common in many of Hassam’s sidewalk scenes, including his important painting of 1890, Washington Arch in Spring . Hassam explained his method of modern history painting as aiming to catch truthfully “his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.”
Resource: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, Sue Taylor and Richard Born, eds. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990, p. 94.