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Biography
Childe Hassam was the premier Impressionist painter of New York City. From 1890 through World War I he painted its fashionable boulevards, genteel park lanes, festive military parades, new neighborhoods, and occasionally, as in Manhattan's Misty Sunset, the new skyline that was prompting many to call New York the eighth wonder of the world. Like many American Impressionists, Hassam was a New Englander. A charter member of The Ten, he began drawing in the 1870s, studying in Boston under William Rimmer and the Munich academician, Ignaz Gaugengigl. Influenced by the tonalist painter, George Fuller, Hassam became well-known for his street scenes such as Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston (1885, The Toledo Museum of Art). He went to Paris in 1886, making numerous rural and urban plein-air paintings that put him in the center of the emerging American Impressionist brotherhood. He returned to Boston in 1889, eventually settling in New York City.
In this painting, Hassam shifts away from the sunny, smiling atmosphere of his pre-1900 city scenes. Manhattan's Misty Sunset still shows an allegiance to plein-air painting; yet despite the attention to light, atmosphere, and weather conditions, the work was probably done in Hassam's studio on West 67th Street.' Hassam had painted other twilight rainy scenes before 1911, seizing on the way the cold drizzle blurred the detail of objects and made bold, abstract designs out of the big city structures. (continued on the bottom)
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Such calculations brought his work closer in spirit to James Abbott McNeill Whistler's nocturnes than to the sundrenched boulevard documents of Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Here, the failing moments of the evening, which the French Impressionists seldom painted, cast a veiled mystery over the constructed scene, linking the painting to Whistler's Thames paintings and the pictorialist photography of Hassam's contemporaries, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Alfred Steiglitz. Hassam's color range is narrow and organized around cool tones; there is a controlled thickness in the brushwork and the shades of green paint are slathered over the generalized shapes of the Brooklyn warehouses, the East River, the lower tip of Manhattan, and the distant glimpse of the Hudson River.
One senses Hassam's ambivalence toward modern industrial America. He had first pictured the massive excavations and constructions in The Hovel and the Skyscraper (1904, private collection), where the elevated viewpoint suggests a metropolitan impersonality. Hassam defined the ". . . changing character of New York from a city of brownstone hovels and pedestrian walks to one of skyscrapers and elevated railways." Still, Manhattan's Misty Sunset shows New York on the verge of the skyscraper era, not fully in it. The two tall structures, whose identity is unknown, pierce the Manhattan skyline but do not overwhelm the human scale of the smaller commercial buildings. Hassam's distant Brooklyn vantage point, the ribbons of mist partly shrouding the solid forms, as well as the evening light, soften the effect of the concrete canyons across the East River. There is a melancholy poetry here, a poignant transition between the realities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Edward Hopper would also occasionally suggest in his paintings.
In later years, Hassam preoccupied himself with patriotic, decorative paintings of war-time New York City. These festive interpretations of people and flags in the streets of the increasingly skyscraper dominated New York brought him great popular and critical success.