Many of Hubbell's finest works of art are decorations, painted at a time when that term encompassed none of the perjorative that it has gained over this last century. Beginning in the late 19th century with the art and philosophy of Whistler, with whom Hubbell studied for a short time and whose technique he admired tremendously, the decorativeness of a painting freed it from the moral baggage which had previously constrained it and which often hid not only its potential beauty but also the limitations and mediocrity of its author. Hubbells's finest pictures deny any mediocrity, and in their full development and display of sensuous beauty, both in image and in artistry, they offer a consumate challenge to revisionist constraints upon the purposes of art.