The Philadelphia-born Glackens began his career in newspaper illustration. His work at The Philadelphia Record, beginning in 1892, as well as night classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, brought him in touch with the artists—Robert Henri, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and George Luks—that would form the core of the Ashcan school. His first trip to Europe, in 1895, was in the company of Robert Henri, who impressed upon him the value of Manet and the Dutch masters. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Glackens did not take the European opportunity to study at any of the French schools, but he nonetheless returned stateside with ambitions grander than Philadelphia newspapers could accommodate. Moving to New York in 1896, he began a campaign towards his own explosive views of city life. Beginning in the sooty tones of the Ashcan group, he gradually developed as a brilliant colorist, reworking Renior’s treatment of color for his own personal Impressionism.

The intersection of The Eight—the rough grouping of artists that would later be referred to as the Ashcan artists—was brief, and not long after their first exhibition together, at Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1908, the center of the Ashcan aesthetic broke into different directions. Living a few doors down from Everett Shinn and across Washington Square from Maurice Prendergast, Glackens spent the next few years aggressively championing the French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art that was filtering into New York. By 1913, he was lamenting,

Everything worthwhile in our art is due to the influence of French art. We have not yet arrived at a national art . . . But there is promise of a renaissance in American Art [as quoted by William Gertds, William Glackens (1996), p. 88].

The present work was executed at a pivotal point in Glackens’ career, as he blended sooty urbanism with a luminous, post-impressionist palette. It’s chromatic treatment of light and dark is far from the Renoir-ism he would pursue later, but it also evinces none of the tonal treatment of light of his earlier work. Like some of his contemporaries, driven snow provided a perfect vehicle for applying impressionist technique to urban settings. Painters from Guy Wiggins to Childe Hassam used snow as an opportunity to express light as color, and Glackens took up the task with elan, treating the fading sun on the tree-tops with radiant hues and the cool snow below in blues and icy whites. Everett Shinn remarked of Glackens’ work, “All color is mingled with his mighty draughtsmanship . . . Paint is audible in children’s games and park” [as quoted by Bruce Weber in Homage to the Square (2001), p. 54].

If the treatment of the scene is dazzling, the true subject of the picture is Washington Square itself. Glackens’ first interest in the rendering of park scenes was in Paris in the 1890s, but upon his permanent move to New York, he was smitten by Washington Square. The park’s iconic arch, designed by Stanford White, had just been completed in 1892, and, by 1904, when Glackens moved there, it was a teeming hub of life. Compared to Central Park, which drew Glackens’ attention on a few occasions, Washington Square was picturesque in design and compact in size, a perfect setting for views of children at play and pedestrians strolling. Glackens lived on the park at 3 Washington Square North from 1904 to 1907, when the first of his “Square” paintings was completed, in 1906. He returned to the park in 1911, residing at 29 Washington Square West until 1919 and working at a studio on Washington Square South through 1922. During these years, he completed some twenty major canvases devoted to his muse—many of them winter scenes.

The present work is a stand-out example of Glackens pictures of the square. The cropping of the scene is compact, nearly squaring off the serpentine pathways through the park while the tree trunks instead are allowed to slither. Glackens loved a snow-ball fight, and we see one in full tilt in the central passage of the picture, the forms of the children simplified to dynamic streaks of blue. The very tops of the trees hint at the wild Renoir-ism still to come in Glackens’ career, but the painting, likely created at the beginning of his tenure at the parlor studio at 50 Washington Square South, is a grand summa of Glacken’s love of the life of the city as it courses through the veins of one of its most celebrated green spaces.