Born on the 4th of July
Artist Hanaiah Harari painted this whimsical Independence Day scene from sketches made during the summer of 1940. Harari recollected the evening celebration that inspired this painting: "It was a mild night. The national flag was raised in the center of the lawn. The brilliant lights of the pyrotechnics pierced the darkness and illuminated the flag and my companions, who, abandoned themselves to the occasion and engaged themselves in running spontaneously about while holding the blazing sparklers in their hands, thus etching streaks of light against the night."
In Sparklers on the Fourth, Harari captures the light that pierced the dusky night. Layering dark pigment over a white ground, he etched into the painting's surface, using the whiteness of the ground to illuminate the nocturnal sense.
Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989).
Pictured: Hananiah Harari, born 1912, Sparklers on the Fourth, 1940, oil, 26 x 34 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost.
Artist Hanaiah Harari painted this whimsical Independence Day scene from sketches made during the summer of 1940. Harari recollected the evening celebration that inspired this painting: "It was a mild night. The national flag was raised in the center of the lawn. The brilliant lights of the pyrotechnics pierced the darkness and illuminated the flag and my companions, who, abandoned themselves to the occasion and engaged themselves in running spontaneously about while holding the blazing sparklers in their hands, thus etching streaks of light against the night."