Boston Public Garden

Painted in 1893, when Edward Emerson Simmons was working on mural decorations for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Boston Public Garden depicts a wintertime view of the park looking east over Arlington and Newbury Streets from a second-story window of the St. Botolph Club, of which Simmons was a member. Both the street and the parkland are covered in fresh snow with only a fence separating them. Beneath the silence, horse-drawn traffic and a queue of pedestrians approaching the park allude to the continuous pulse of city life. The loose, casual brushwork and the way figures are cropped at the lower left to imply passing motion are hallmarks of the impressionist aesthetic that was gaining ground among American painters at the time, and the museum's own catalogue notes this as part of a broader turn toward urban park scenes, comparing it directly to Childe Hassam's nearby Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, painted the year before. Simmons and Hassam were close friends and later founding members of Ten American Painters, the group Hassam invited Simmons to join in 1898. Simmons rarely showed work with them, though, preferring mural commissions for their public reach. Born in Concord, Massachusetts to an impoverished old New England family, Simmons grew up in the shadow of his mother's cousin Ralph Waldo Emerson, studied at Harvard, then trained in Paris at the Académie Julian before painting years in Concarneau and founding an art colony at St. Ives. When Boston Public Garden was shown again in 1912 with The Ten, one contemporary critic reportedly lamented that Simmons had largely abandoned landscape work for murals by then- a shift the artist himself said he preferred, valuing permanence and public exposure over the gallery circuit.