About this work
- *Return of the Fleet* is a **lithograph** on tracing paper with deckle edges, created on **December 26, 1918** — just weeks after the WWI Armistice (November 11, 1918). - It depicts **naval ships at anchor in the Hudson River**, with a launch visible in the lower foreground. It is inscribed on the stone: *"The Hudson / Noon, Dec 26, 1918."* - It is held in collections including the **National Gallery of Art** and the **Museum of Fine Arts, Houston**. - Hassam began making lithographs around 1917 and the work sits within his broader wartime engagement — the same patriotic, documentary impulse that drove the Flag Series. - Hassam was even arrested (and quickly released) for innocently sketching naval maneuvers along the city's rivers — a biographical detail that makes this very scene charged with personal meaning.
The scene is spare, monumental, and unexpectedly still. Naval ships ride at anchor in the Hudson River, a launch visible in the lower foreground — the great warships reduced by distance and the lithographic medium to dark, heavy silhouettes against the pale expanse of water. Hassam worked the stone with characteristic economy: the tonal range is tight, running from silvery mid-grays to deep blacks, yet the composition breathes. The Hudson opens wide around the fleet, giving the vessels a quality of solitary authority. There is no fanfare here, no crowds — only the river, the ships, and a noon light that falls without drama across the water's surface.
Hassam inscribed the stone at lower right: *"The Hudson / Noon, Dec 26, 1918" — a date that tells you everything about the image's emotional register. The Armistice had been signed just six weeks earlier. The flag paintings were exhibited together for the first time four days after the Armistice was declared in November 1918, to document the story of American entry into the Great War and to commemorate its victorious conclusion — and *Return of the Fleet* belongs to that same spirit of reckoning. About 1915, Hassam began to turn his efforts to printmaking, producing etchings and drypoints at first, and lithographs about two years later , which means the medium was still relatively new to him when he stood at the Hudson's edge that December. He had been arrested — and quickly released — for innocently sketching naval maneuvers along the city's rivers earlier in the war; that the fleet now came home in peace gave the act of drawing it an almost vindicating weight. Where the Flag Series burned with color and civic pageantry, this lithograph is its quiet counterpart — the war's end rendered not in celebration but in contemplation.
As wall art, *Return of the Fleet* rewards the kind of room that doesn't need to shout. It belongs in a study, a hallway, or a reading room with natural light — somewhere that allows its cool grays to settle and its historical gravity to register slowly. The work
