Figures in Sunlight

"There is nothing so interesting to me as people," Childe Hassam reported in an 1892 interview. "I am never tired of observing them in everyday life, as they hurry through the streets on business or saunter down the promenade on pleasure. Humanity in motion is a continual study to me." In this instance, the artist has depicted passersby in front of the Fine Arts Building on the site of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Hassam visited Chicago in 1892 and 1893 to help prepare a series of works that would document the buildings and grounds of the exposition in a series of lithographs. While there, he also did a number of drawings that depicted the buildings of the exposition as well as a series of oil paintings and watercolors. According to Hassam, he left Chicago before the formal opening of the exposition, a fact that is not apparent in several of the resulting works, which appear to be done while events are in full swing.