A Renaissance Soul in the Heart of Brooklyn Hamilton Easter Field was a man whose very existence seemed to bridge the gap between the ancient and the avant-garde. Born in 1873, he was far more than a mere painter; he was a polymath of the aesthetic world—a critic, a dealer, an educator, and a patron whose influence rippled through the American art scene of the early twentieth century. While his formal education began with the structured disciplines of architecture and engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of and Columbia, his true calling revealed itself under the soft, impressionistic li…