Collection Connection is a series of personal responses by museum staff to works in the Frye Art Museum’s collection.
“I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”
― Teju Cole, artist and writer
Like most people, I have been walking around my neighborhood more than ever these days. Since I’m mostly going out for the exercise, my paths through the residential streets of Phinney Ridge are usually haphazard. In the absence of a destination, small details have become familiar bright spots that mark the passing of time with more resonance than clocks seem to offer anymore. A triangular block lined with cherry trees surprised me with a shower of petals one morning in March, just as I was missing our annual visits to the University of Washington quad this time of year. When I catch the red pandas napping on a branch through a space in the bushes that surround the shuttered Woodland Park Zoo, I know I’ve made it through to the afternoon. The buttery aroma of baking pie shells that wafts through the back screen door of a nearby shop makes evenings feel more homey and lived-in.
These small details of my own walks linger brightly in my mind against the monotonous routine of quarantine life. They have also drawn my eye to the work of Childe Hassam (1859–1935) lately, whose painting Parc Monceau, Paris (1897) is in the Frye’s Founding Collection and depicts a park that the artist visited while he was a student at the Académie Julian in 1886. Considered one of the earliest American Impressionists, Hassam combined bold brushwork, a bright palette, and his characteristic emphasis on light to make a quiet stroll feel momentous and memorable, much in the same way I remember the highlights of my own walks.
Although his earlier paintings often focus on Paris, Hassam spent much of his life in New York, capturing the city as skyscrapers began transforming the skyline in the early twentieth century—changes the artist witnessed from an apartment that overlooked West 57th Street. In 1914, he incorporated printmaking into his practice, going on to execute over 350 etchings and 40 lithographs. The Frye’s collection includes several etchings of New York that Hassam created around the time of his generation’s major global event: World War I.
I appreciate these etchings for the vicarious escape they offer in our present time of confinement. Their impressionistic style and blurred lines make their scenes feel like memories, enough so that I found myself mapping their locations to see if I might have walked past them the last time I visited New York. Calvary Baptist Church is near the southern border of Central Park, while the locations shown in Fifth Avenue, Noon, NY and Little Church Around the Corner are between Bryant Park and Madison Square; all are within a half hour walk, connected to one another by 5th Avenue (another of Hassam’s frequent subjects during this time).
While it feels impossibly long before I will be able to take such a walk through New York again, The New York Times has been providing another source of escape: a series of virtual architectural walks. The tour nearest to the landmarks of the etchings is a journey through Broadway’s theaters, many of which were constructed around the time Hassam was living in New York, in the early twentieth century. The series’ creator Michael Kimmelman writes of his intent for these walks: “Distraction, joy, consolation, a chance to describe how buildings speak — and speak, historically, personally, deeply and differently to different people.” But the next time I go out my front door, I will also be thinking of walks themselves—how even the most modest walks speak to us and transform with us over time.
Erin Langner
Exhibitions & Publications Coordinator