About this work
**Depicts:** A nocturnal, rainy Chicago street scene — a carriage and a tram gliding through a wet city night, dominated by blues and pale yellows
**Context:** Made during Hassam's visit to Chicago for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
*Nocturne, Railway Crossing, Chicago* was created in 1893 in the Impressionist style, and it is one of the most intimate and atmospheric works Hassam ever made. The watercolour is simple in both colour and composition, yet rich in lyrical beauty — a nocturnal scene showing a fragment of urban life, as a carriage and a tram glide down the road on a rainy night. Blues dominate everything: the wet pavement, the dissolving architecture, the sky swallowed into itself. Against that cool field, pale yellow streetlamps flicker and bleed into the dark, their reflections streaking across the rain-slicked street. The composition is deliberately spare — what might otherwise read as too urban or simply mundane becomes, in Hassam's hands, a blue poem; instead of bustle and noise, he hears a sonata in the steady beats of the rain and the rhythm of the horse-drawn carriage. The viewer is not inside the scene but at the edge of it, watching through wet glass.
Hassam created several paintings during his engagement with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, having visited the city in 1892 to prepare works connected to the Fair. But *Nocturne, Railway Crossing, Chicago* is something apart from those daylit, civic celebrations of American progress. The work is now held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. It belongs to a sustained practice of nocturnal urban painting that Hassam pursued through the 1890s — a period in which his technique increasingly evolved toward Impressionism in both oil and watercolor, even as the movement itself was giving way to Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. Where his Chicago Fair paintings served an almost documentary function, this watercolour was purely personal: these nocturnes explored the mood of the bustling evening city streets, which Hassam found distinctly opposite his lively daylight scenes of urban life. The choice of watercolour heightens the fragility of the moment — everything slightly unresolved, everything about to dissolve further into the rain.
Hassam, as an Impressionist, tended to capture the moment — and he does it beautifully here
