Abstract
Paintings of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago by Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Thomas Moran, and others recorded and interpreted that event as utopic fantasy for the fair's immediate audience and for posterity. Selectively endorsing the organizers' and designers' assigned meanings in their views of the fair's structures and waterways, the artists were also conscious of rendering permanent a city and an event which were as ephemeral as they were grandiose. Like the program of the fair they record, these paintings work by metonymy, exclusion, and abbreviation, and situate themselves at once as cultural commentary and aesthetic souvenir.
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