Childe Hassam (1859 to 1935) was an American painter, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, who became the leading American Impressionist. He is remembered above all for his Flag series, about thirty views of Fifth Avenue hung with Allied flags during the First World War, and one of them, The Avenue in the Rain, has hung in the Oval Office.
He painted New York's streets, the gardens of an island off New Hampshire and women at sunlit windows, with French brushwork and American subjects. He turned out so many pictures that a critic once wrote: "Think of the appalling number of Hassam pictures there will be in the world by the time the man is seventy years old!"
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The flag paintings began in the street. In 1916 a Preparedness Parade, a march meant to push America toward the war in Europe, moved down Fifth Avenue, and Hassam went home and painted the avenue buried in flags. He kept at it until 1919, and by then he had about thirty canvases.
The best known is The Avenue in the Rain, painted in February 1917, two months before the United States entered the war. It was given to the White House in 1963 and first hung in John F. Kennedy's bedroom. Later it moved to the Oval Office, where it has hung in the terms of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
The idea may not have been entirely American. In 1878 Claude Monet had painted two Paris streets covered in flags for a national celebration, and Hassam, who had lived in Paris in the 1880s, may have had those canvases in mind. A painting of Fifth Avenue in the Oval Office may owe something to a street in Paris.
What You'll Discover
How a fire made him an engraver.
Whose old studio he moved into.
The poet whose garden he painted.
Why ten painters walked out.
What the flags show up close.
What he called modern art.