To a cultural historian with little formal training in art history, the paintings listed in this catalogue present themselves primarily as historical documents, sources of insight into the history of the city. Yet the process of interpreting these sources is not as simple a matter as this might suggest. What exactly does it mean to consider a painting historically, to see it as a "document"? Certainly, it must be regarded first as a painting. Most obviously, the historicity of a painting lies in its subject matter, the scenes and events from the past as they are portrayed at a particular time. One tries to look at these paintings as searchingly as the painter's contemporaries did, yet it is not possible for us to see the paintings as viewers did at the time they were painted. Our perceptions have been shaped by profound cultural changes, by photography and film, for example, as well as by the dramatically different urban world in which we now live. The meaning of these paintings is locked within the conventions the artists employed, and it is left to us to puzzle it out. In short, despite our preoccupation with the New York context, our responses are profoundly shaped by the character and quality of the representations themselves, the manner, the idiom, the genre employed in each case by the artist. Their meaning, or at least their historical meaning, lies -- with painting as with every other kind of document -- in some combination of subject and manner, of the what and the how, which when they are combined make up the New York subject in all its mutations.

New York as a subject of painting and lithography (and later photography and other graphic arts) has a complex history that differs in interesting ways from its place in other art forms. New York figures prominently, for example, in the American novel and in poetry. Beginning with Washington Irving's satirical Dietrich Knickerbocker's History of New York in 1807, a flood of fiction about the city or set in the city began to appear and continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. It seems that the New York subject was adopted by almost every major talent -- Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, William Dean Howells, O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, Hart Crane, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Damon Runyon, John Dos Passos, and many others. Poets, too, have made the city their subject, no one more so than Walt Whitman. Whereas the crest of New York literary portrayals may have passed, novels about the city by E. L. Doctorow and other contemporary writers continue to appear. New York as a setting for mystery writers is rivaled only by Los Angeles. The fascination that New York has exercised over writers of fiction as a vast emporium of urban imagery and diverse human experience clearly continues.

Literary works -- novels and long poems like Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Hart Crane's The Bridge -- provide an interesting contrast to graphic art in their development of New York as a subject. In verbal narrative and discursive writing the city takes shape over time, necessarily, because the city gradually unfolds for the reader as the plot progresses. Narrative voice also incrementally qualifies the character of the city in literary works. Verbal images of the city, that is, build consecutively for a reader, whereas viewers confront visual images all at once. Another striking difference between verbal and graphic portrayals of New York lies in the unique kind of subjective perspective provided by poems and novels, as portrayals of the city unfold from the narrator's fictive consciousness. This kind of singularity of consciousness is most apparent in poetry, as in Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," where the sweep of the harbor as seen from the ferry deck is projected, as he puts it, from "the impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day."¹

No matter who the author -- Herman Melville, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, or Scott Fitzgerald -- a descriptive passage may reveal something of interest about the city, but it is far more likely that it will reveal something of significance about the narrator and the narrative in progress, that it will predict some aspect of the narrative to follow. In the opening chapter of Melville's Moby-Dick, for example, his narrator, Ishmael, having spent the night in the city, wanders down to the Battery and reflects on the universal magnetism of the sea: "Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlear's Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? -- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the piles; some seated upon the pierheads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep."² Although there is descriptive detail in this passage, some of it similar to that of many paintings of the New York waterfront, this detail is subordinated to the singular consciousness of the narrator. It is, you might say, rhetorical and functional rather than pictorial. How, for example, would one paint or draw "thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries?" The New York here, as in so many novels, is the city as threshold. Whether the narrator is passing through, as in this case, or entering, the city is made to stand for some kind of imminent possibility locked within the narrative's future.

In Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Carrie Meeber's first sight of Broadway at theater time is another example of the New York scene as prognosticator: "Carrie stepped along easily enough after they got out of the car at Thirty-fourth Street but soon fixed her eyes on the lovely company which swarmed by them as they proceeded. With a start she awoke to find that she was in fashion's crowd, on parade in a show place! Jeweler's windows gleamed along the path with remarkable frequency. Florist shops, furriers, haberdashers, confectioners -- all followed in rapid succession. The street was full of coaches."³ The Broadway scene described here is not the Broadway of any graphic artist but a highly personal one deeply encoded with Carrie's future as an actress and fashionable celebrity.

Narrative prognosticator and singularity of consciousness are scarcely graceful terms, but they help to define what seems to be unique about verbal descriptions of New York in poetry and fiction. In fiction the flow of narrative consciousness largely determines what aspects of the city a novelist chooses to describe. For this reason conventions of the kind that characterize paintings do not exist in fictional New York, which becomes a kind of grab bag of narrative needs. Drawing and painting may, of course, be highly personal, but the city as described is not enveloped in consciousness as it is in fiction, and, except perhaps in illustrations, a picture does not point but, so to speak, is. What it is, however, is shaped by conventions that developed in painting for portraying cities and city life. Within these conventions there is space for narrative, but the kind of narrative embedded in painting is very different from fictional narrative -- less focused, with multiple strands, in most cases implicit rather than developed.

Nineteenth-century New York as it was portrayed in painting was a kind of cracked mirror or jumbled jigsaw. Its fragmented character, in contrast to the New York of fiction, resulted from the stan-dardization of the facets of New York life that drew the attention of artists. A relatively short list of subjects suggests the comparatively narrow range of this work: perspectives on the city and the harbor as seen from a distance; recreational scenes of parks and public places; pictures of parades and other public events; pictures of important buildings and central sites within the city; such dramatic events as fires; and, perhaps the most urban subject, genre scenes depicting typical urban types and urban activities. These subject headings pretty much exhaust the repertory of New York's early nineteenth-century painters. Judged by our standards of realistic portrayal, all this work strikes us as highly stylized.

The New York Harbor and waterfront were at the center of consciousness for anyone living in New York during most of the nineteenth century, far more so than they are today. One popular subject was the marine life of New York harbor. The frequency with which maritime scenes and portraits of sailing ships appear in this book results in part, no doubt, from the Museum's inheritance of the former Marine Museum collection, but there is little question that the visual world of the harbor held fascination and romance for artists throughout the century. In all these paintings, what I have called the city as city takes a back seat.

Two gouache paintings by Nicolino Calyo executed in 1837 are characteristic examples of this maritime genre. Calyo was a Neapolitan by birth and typified the kind of itinerant artist who toured American cities in this period in his use of a particular genre of painting and engraving that he appears to have drawn upon for these pictures. These cityscapes developed during the seventeenth century as a way of portraying European cities.⁴ They pictured the city as it appeared against the skyline, with harbor or river in the foreground, as in Jan Vermeer's View of Delft or Pieter Bruegel's Bay of Naples. Appearing at about the same time, a more popular genre of engraving catered to the city's commercial interests and apparently sold widely.⁵ One such engraving by Frederik de Wit (London, a City of Great Traffic, c. 1690), depicting London after the Great Fire, had a particularly wide circulation (fig. 10). These works were a variant of the developing genre of the romantic landscape. The foreground was often devoted to figures in a pastoral setting. The horizon was low, and almost half the engraving was generally devoted to sky and clouds.

Itinerants and journeyman artists from Europe, who were clearly familiar with such conventions, produced a surprisingly large proportion of the work in this genre. Calyo practiced his art first in Malta. He arrived in Baltimore in 1830, moved to New York in 1835 just in time to paint the great fires that swept the city in December of that year, and then remained in the city another fifteen years. The firm he later founded with one of his sons, N. Calyo and Son, offered instruction in painting and contracted for painting commissions. Calyo exhibited widely during these years. A panorama of the Connecticut River and his paintings of the Mexican War, for example, were shown in New York, Boston, and New Orleans in 1849. In Washington, D.C., he had earlier shown some Italian landscapes and a series of paintings depicting Vesuvius in eruption. He is believed to have worked for a few years in Spain, although he apparently returned to New York before his death in 1884.⁶ In addition to the two pictures I shall discuss, he also contributed other characteristic New York work.

As an experienced and well-traveled professional, Calyo was no doubt keenly aware of what was marketable. He drew upon the conventions for this kind of cityscape in his New York paintings. In the first of these pictures, entitled View of New York from New Jersey, the city makes its distant appearance as a narrow black ribbon just below the horizon with only a few tiny church spires and the rough outlines of the Battery to define it (fig. 11). The painting is dominated by two large sailing ships in heavy weather apparently making for the Jersey shore against an ominously cloudy sky, their crews hard at work. The other picture, called The Brooklyn Navy Yard and New York from Wallabout Bay (fig. 12), is an almost perfect pictorial analogue to the Sabbath Battery scene Melville described in Moby-Dick. The emphasis in Calyo's painting, however, is different. The picture shows Manhattan in the distance from a perspective in Brooklyn. A grouping of trees in the foreground along the waterfront, a moored dory, and a few figures walking along a road and fishing from a pier set a classic pastoral tone. Half a dozen ships are either anchored or moving about the estuary. Once again, Manhattan is scarcely more than a ribbon of building elevations, a pincushion sprouting minute church spires -- clearly an example of the city absorbed into the landscape and neutralized by an overhanging sky that takes up two-thirds of the canvas. No attempt has been made to highlight individual buildings or to delineate the overall shape of the city, as analogous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European urban views had tried to do.⁷

The first half of the nineteenth century produced countless examples of this kind of harbor perspective. Other paintings in the catalogue represent only slight variations on the same essential rendering of the city. One of the most detailed harbor perspectives on Manhattan is a painting by Anthony Imbert, The Erie Canal Celebration, New York, 1825 (plate 6). Imbert was a former French naval officer who had acquired proficiency in painting and drawing while a prisoner of the English. Once in the United States, he settled on Fulton Street just in time to receive a commission to prepare lithographic plates for a volume commemorating the completion of the Erie Canal in November 1825. This particular painting shows the American ships filing by and saluting the British warship, Swallow, off the lower end of Manhattan at the end of the day's festivities. Imbert's view differs from the other harbor paintings in the detail and accuracy with which buildings are drawn. Castle Garden in Battery Park, for example, is clearly visible, as are the spires of Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel. In addition to being a harbor perspective, this painting provides an early example of a second genre of New York painting, which records public and historical occasions. It could also be considered a very early (if inattentive) skyline view of Manhattan. Another record of a historic moment, remarkable in many of the same ways, is Joseph B. Smith's watercolor Steamer "Hartford" Capt. LeFevre, Bound for California, Sailed from New York February 1849 (plate 21). Like pictures of the lunar missions slightly more than a century later, this picture depicts the launching of an epic and dangerous undertaking, this one employing new and relatively untried steam technology on an itinerary around the Cape, a voyage notorious for its dangers. This picture is also notable for the detail with which the Brooklyn waterfront in the background is rendered, but it is especially noteworthy for the inclusion of the crowds seeing the ship off and the passengers on deck. This depiction of the crowd on the pier waving and passengers waving back underscores the air of civility implicit in all these paintings, a particular narrative moment captured by an artist's rendering of a public event in progress. This is a well-behaved and decorous crowd perfectly in keeping with the socially uncontested image of urban civility prevalent in paintings of this period.⁸

In December 1835 Nicolino Calyo, working from a perspective near the Bank of America on the corner of Wall and William Streets, executed a gouache of the great fire that destroyed the Merchant's Exchange and most of the buildings surrounding it (plate 11). In selecting this subject, Calyo was anticipating the appetite for the theatrical and catastrophic to which the illustrated press would later cater. Here he sketched in the scene with its teams of firefighters battling the blaze in the night. He also included an important detail that explains a good deal about the kind of representation to be found in much of this early work. Off to the left in the background he included lines of orderly spectators, their faces illuminated by the flame, intent on what is occurring before them -- a narrative detail that seems to locate the audience for the picture within the picture itself. The audience is encouraged by such a strategy to see themselves as occupying a place within the historic event portrayed in the painting, almost as though the event were actually taking place in their presence. The civic order and decorousness that characterize representations of New York in this period would therefore appear to compose a frame that viewers were expected to bring to their perception of the city, even, or perhaps especially, during such a destructive and threatening event as this conflagration.

It is not difficult to see, if there is validity in such a hypothesis, why the picturesque occupies such a central place in the aesthetic thinking of mid-century New York. The association of New York with urban violence grew during the 1840s and 1850s, as riots of one kind or another, culminating in the Draft Riots of 1863, wracked the city.⁹ The picturesque, which after all depicts the world not as it is but as it ought to be, comes into conflict with the realities of a developing commercial city, perhaps never more interesting aesthetically than in the Greensward Plan submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1858 in a competition for the design of Central Park. They argued for the importance of creating a "natural" park in the city to alleviate the negative visual features of the modern commercial city. They described their conception of a park as a three-dimensional picturesque painting that would allow thousands of visitors to wander unimpeded through a constantly changing natural landscape. The noxious and disruptive commerce of the city was to be routed through submerged transverse roads that would convey it unperceived through the park. The reality of the city, in other words, was acknowledged but kept from view, as in the urban paintings of the period.¹⁰

It is not surprising that Central Park emerged as a popular subject for painters in the last half of the century. An early example is George Loring Brown's 1862 painting of the still largely treeless park, viewed looking south from a point near the Ramble (plate 39). The picture is a classic landscape, with only one slight variation -- the distant urban skyline. Most of the canvas is devoted to a picturesque scene in progress. Canopied boats filled with passengers drift about the lagoon, and other visitors to the park walk along distant roadways and across a bridge over the lagoon. The Terrace north of the Mall in the background to the left provides Brown's landscape with the obligatory formal structure. A foreground group of trees frames the view. The city is here distanced visually from the park but is at the same time coalesced into it, as Olmsted and Vaux might have wished. That is to say, Brown has painted it on the skyline so as to make it appear barely distinguishable from the underbrush and the trees along the horizon.

An 1878 painting of ice skating at night in the park underscores the romantic distance of the nocturnal from the workaday city and contains no visual evidence of the city proper at all (plate 41). Ice skating, already popular in Holland and Scotland, became fashionable in the United States after the Civil War. John O'Brien Inman, son of artist Henry Inman, captured a moment in which a decorous crowd was enjoying this newly popular sport on the lake by the Terrace. The skaters compose a virtual manual of civilized group behavior and social order. The painting is also notable for the complexity of its narrative content. A handful of spectators standing along the shore take in the scene, once again as stand-ins for the viewer. Good manners reign, as gentlemen bow to ladies and ladies curtsy to men; couples drift across the ice. Two women skating together approach in the center foreground, and to the left another skater is being helped to his feet after a fall.¹¹ One younger skater in the background appears to be clowning, but there is no suggestion of disorder or rowdiness in the scene. In 1866 the annual report of the park's commissioner seemed to take account of this phenomenon when it commented that ice was "preserved day after day in good order and order preserved day after day on good ice." Inman was a native-born itinerant who traveled in the South and in the West executing portraits of the kind of genteel people who were engaged in this new and popular recreation.¹² It is scarcely surprising that in New York he would have chosen to depict the scene in this way.

Artists who sketched the densest parts of the city tended to populate them with the kinds of people Inman had portrayed in his skating scene. One favorite site for artists in this period was the intersection on Broadway just below City Hall Park where Park Row angles off to the northeast, for many years the central axis of the city. City Hall, the Astor House (the city's grandest hotel), and Barnum's Museum faced each other across the triangle of streets. For a while Matthew Brady's daguerreotype studio was also nearby. St. Paul's Chapel was adjacent to the Astor House, and the city's newspapers were clustered along Park Row to the east. Broadway, then the major artery between the Battery and Westchester, was jammed from morning until night with horse-drawn carriages, omnibuses, and other vehicles. So busy were the streets in this part of town in the late nineteenth century that pedestrians feared for their lives when crossing the roads.¹³ Paintings of the area, however, rarely hint at the diverse crowds in the streets, the bustle of business, or the traffic jams that seem to have been present from dawn to dark. Instead, they portray decorous assemblies similar in tone to Inman's ice skaters in the park. A watercolor of Broadway executed by Augustus Kollner in 1850 is characteristic of this kind of street scene (fig. 13). Kollner was the kind of omnicompetent, market-sensitive professional artist characteristic of New York in this period. Born in Dusseldorf and trained in Frankfurt, he was a lithographer, mapmaker, and illustrator of books for children and books on horses and sporting life. He also appears to have traveled widely and worked as an itinerant artist.¹⁴ Kollner painted the scene from a perspective near the foot of City Hall Park, facing down Broadway. The Astor House is off to the right, Trinity Church is visible to the south, and Barnum's Museum is on the left where Park Row joins Broadway. Traffic in the streets is confined to three omnibuses, several smaller carriages, and, on the sidewalks, a few gentlemen, all wearing top hats. One horseman crossing in front of the Astor House appears to be cantering, while a number of pedestrians are strolling or conversing on the sidewalks on either side of the intersection. Even the garishness of Barnum's Museum appears muted.

Ten years later August Meyer, another German-trained artist, painted the same area from a slightly different perspective.¹⁵ Meyer's watercolor pictures the scene from a site up Park Row (fig. 14). Almost the entire facade of the Astor House is in view across the bottom corner of City Hall Park, with St. Paul's at its side. The ground is covered with snow. A few carriages move along the streets, and a few genteel strollers populate the sidewalks. There appears to be a crowd in front of St. Paul's, so it may be Sunday. There is no sign of the busy city. Meyer and Kollner, in fact, both portray the commercial center of the city almost as though it were a genteel recreational park.

Depictions of mercantile activities in the city differed little in social character. B. J. Harrison's watercolor drawing Annual Fair of the American Institute at Niblo's Garden (circa 1845) shows such an event in progress (plate 19). Niblo's Garden was a pleasure palace and exhibition hall on lower Broadway. These fairs sold everything from top hats to works of art of various kinds. Harrison's portrayal of this gala of materialism is interesting because it suggests in detail the immense range of domestic manufactured goods on display. An upper mezzanine contains artworks. The walls of the ground floor display quilts, and glass cases are arranged to provide access to items of clothing and household goods. At the right, a cashier completes a sale for a customer. Nothing in this scene hints at the frantic pace of commercial activity in the surrounding city. Indeed, the goods in all their variety are displayed in an order that rivals that of the clientele browsing through the display cases and the balcony above. Once again the city is portrayed as an uncontested urban space occupied exclusively by polite ladies and gentlemen at leisure.

Many of these paintings portray commercial activities as a kind of popular theater. An 1843 oil painting possibly by French-born artist Eugene Didier depicts an auction in progress at a designated location for such activity in Chatham Square, a part of the downtown retail district known for the cheap goods available in the nearby shops (plate 14). Furniture and other household goods are being sold to the highest bidder. From the look of those items on display, the sale consists of worn and ramshackle goods. Didier has chosen to represent the scene in a genre painting with comic overtones. The auctioneer, in a stovepipe hat, is given an almost simian face and crouch. Two men, gentlemen by their clothes, appear to be doing the most active bidding. Another gentleman, on the right, stands by. All the other figures, some with their faces barely sketched in, a few others individualized, seem from their dress to belong to the city's poorer classes. One of the women in the foreground, her face showing distress, is trying to halt the auctioneer or to get his attention. A small boy, seated on the table, is keeping a record of the bids. One couple in modest dress seems undecided about bidding. Other working-class figures hover indistinctly in the background, seemingly uninvolved.

Among the most informative portrayals of economic activity in antebellum New York was a series of thirty-six watercolor drawings completed by Nicolino Calyo between 1840 and 1844 under the title New York Street Cries, Chanters and Views (fig. 15). Such portrayals of commercial street life and peddlers were an established tradition in Europe.¹⁶ Calyo, the Neapolitan-born itinerant artist, here brings this tradition to the portrayal of New York street occupations. Calyo chose for his gallery of New York's menial service class such figures as boot cleaners, newsboys, chimney sweeps, milkmen, the oyster man, the match boy, and someone described as "the auctioneer in public streets." The series forms a collective portrait of the street economy, that of domestic service and provisioning: butcher, baker, oil man, and watchman are actors in Calyo's pageant of petty urban vendors. These watercolor studies were collected into a volume published in the 1840s, with sentimental poems and other commentary following the drawing of each of the trades. The commentary makes clear that these figures were menials in the service of a householder class. The note below the chimney sweep says: "It is indispensable that the chimneys should be swept often and thoroughly, as a provision against fire. The poor sweep, therefore, as he follows a useful and indispensable occupation, should not only be treated kindly but be also well paid for his labor. In this city the business of sweeping chimneys is confined to colored men and boys, although in London white men and boys are thus employed."¹⁷ Calyo's pictures range from the black "hot corn" woman crouching on the street in a colorful hat with a shawl around her shoulders, her bucket of corn before her (fig. 16), to the portrait of Irishman Patrick Bryant dispensing wares at his oyster stand, dressed in stovepipe hat and frock coat (fig. 17). All are less an affirmation of the city's diverse population than a pictorial assessment of New York's service class from the perspective of the gentleman's kitchen door.

In the catalogue's paintings dating from the final decades of the century, there is little change in aesthetic attitude. This is especially surprising considering the magnitude of the changes occurring in the city itself during these years. The comfortable middle-class world portrayed in paintings earlier in the century was being replaced by a city gripped by mercurial changes: industrial expansion, booming ocean commerce, a flood of immigrants, and unprecedented social problems. Yet in the work of artists, little attention seems to have been devoted to the changes that were sweeping over Manhattan, to social unrest or labor conflict, or to the colorful ethnic neighborhoods that were beginning to develop on the Lower East Side and along the western rim of the island -- the social milieu that O. Henry and Stephen Crane exploited in their stories. The new high-rise buildings are also little evident in the catalogue selections.

Cityscape painting dating from the late nineteenth century, to judge from this sample, appears far more conservative in its selection of subjects than photography, which in this period had begun to expand its subject range enormously. Successful New York artists such as Childe Hassam continued to reproduce the picturesque, decorous New York of parks and streets that contained little evidence of these changes. Hassam had trained and exhibited in Paris before settling in New York at the end of the 1880s, and he had clearly been influenced by such urban Impressionists as Camille Pissaro and Claude Monet. Hassam and other artists who painted New York in this period, such as Paul Cornoyer and Joseph Oppenheimer, brought back much more than Impressionist technique from their sojourns in Paris. They also returned with the vision of contemporary urbanity that Paris embodied. Through an aesthetic rendering of streets and parks, public monuments and Beaux Arts buildings, painters learned to promote New York as a work of art and a subject of romance.

American Impressionists, like their French progenitors, also seem to have been interested in new industrial structures, lighting materials, and the ways natural light played over them, but the effect of their technique, as in Hassam's 1907 painting of the Wall Street area (fig. 18), was to soften the city's harsh realities behind veils of light. The Impressionist palette in France had retouched and romanticized not only its parks, churches, and cathedrals but also its railway stations, canal barges, bridges, industrial sites, and the sloping curving streets of Montmartre. Poverty, dirt, and low life were rendered as compositions of color and light. And Hassam's New York work, like that of many of his contemporaries, differed from that of earlier artists in palette and exhibited such Impressionist touches as light reflected from wet pavement and the blurred contours of street life in a snow storm. His Union Square was not the Union Square of labor protests that began to take place there as early as 1882, nor that of Tammany Hall around the corner. The only recognizable figures in his 1890 painting Rainy Late Afternoon, Union Square are the genteel bodies in the foreground. The crowd in the park is depicted as a wall of umbrellas in a distant background, its social composition only to be inferred from the foreground figures (plate 50). His painting Winter Afternoon in New York, produced ten years later, shows an almost deserted street rutted with snow as three hansom cabs pass and a half dozen pedestrians move through the driving storm (fig. 19). The only hint of the modern city is the obscure outline of a high-rise building in the background.

Much of the other work in the catalogue from this period is similar in character. In 1900 Paul Cornoyer's Washington Square and Joseph Oppenheimer's Madison Square inaugurated the twentieth century with Impressionist tonalities on a distinctly Parisian note. Cornoyer chose a perspective from somewhere in the middle of the park facing north toward the Memorial Arch (plate 56). A few figures stroll in the middle ground shrouded by overhanging trees. Oppenheimer chose an elevated perspective looking north on a winter day from Fifth Avenue across the confluence of Broadway and Fifth Avenue opposite the park (plate 53). Hansom cabs are crowding down Fifth Avenue in the foreground, and another row of waiting cabs lines the southern boundary of the park. A few indistinct figures are scattered about the streets and the park, which itself appears as a cluster of trees rooted in the snowy surface below. Samuel Landsman's 1899 watercolor Dewey Celebration at Madison Square, drawn from a similar perspective, differs from other contemporary painting in the highly stylized rendering of the ranks of troops moving through the memorial arch. It is the orderly geometry of the parade and the pageantry surrounding it, not the park or Madison Square Garden towering in the distance, that dominates the scene (fig. 20).

The Museum's collection includes some paintings that illustrate the magnitude of the changes in subject that were taking place in the early part of the twentieth century. In the first decade the gritty urban realism of the Ash Can School had turned the attention of painters to a much wider vector of social and recreational life. Painters were somewhat late in their embrace of these "other half" topics, which photographers, draftsmen, and illustrators had been interpreting since the turn of the century. Suddenly in the work of such painters as John Sloan the entire city, its sights, its troubles, and its colorful mix of people at work and at play became part of the New York subject. By the 1920s the Precisionists such as Charles Sheeler were finding geometry and abstract beauty in the urban industrial scene. After seeing Paul Strand's photographs of the city's tall buildings, around 1915, and his arresting views from their summits, painters were quick to follow suit. John Marin's watercolors of New York turned the city into a kinetic fantasy of color and design. By the 1930s Stuart Davis and Joseph Stella began to move the city into the realm of abstraction.

Robert Hallowell's 1929 view of Wall Street, the harbor, and the Statue of Liberty in the distance, painted from a pinnacle near the Standard Oil Building, shows that the skyscraper had come of age as a subject (fig. 21). By the 1930s the transformation in the New York subject was complete. Maurice Kish used a dark palette for his 1932 East River Waterfront, showing a setting of factories, smokestacks, and industrial machinery that would have been unthinkable as a painter's subject thirty or forty years earlier (plate 70). The growing painterly interest in the city's ethnic life and working-class recreation, first introduced by painters such as John Sloan and later by Reginald Marsh, is demonstrated by several of the catalogue entries. Esther Goetz's 1936 Sullivan Street (fig. 22) attempts to capture the multifaceted street life and visual clutter of a predominately Italian Greenwich Village neighborhood. Victor Perard, like Hassam, had been trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but his reading of the New York social scene in Trolley Riders (1907 - 1910) was far different from Hassam's focus on the decorous world of turn-of-the-century New York (fig. 23). His trolley passengers returning from Coney Island appear to be a cross section of urban social types shown in a relaxed and high-spirited mood.

Several paintings by James W. Kerr reinforce the shift that had taken place. His 1931 In Chinatown, New York City pales in comparison to contemporary Chinatown but suggests the exotic attraction that Chinese culture had begun to exercise over the city's artists (fig. 24). Here Kerr singled out a segment of street that includes a laundry, a barber shop, and a tailor's shop with a Chinese Alliance on the upper floor. His 1946 Shootin' Gallery seems to highlight the wartime expansion of cheap amusements on 42nd Street (fig. 25). The clients at the gallery, most of them servicemen with their women friends, are portrayed from the rear. The figure in the foreground, cigarette in hand, may be Kerr himself. His 1944 Times Square Dim-Out catches the Broadway wartime scene during the blackout in 1942 (plate 93). The diverse crowd moves through the darkened street against a background of unilluminated signs. A solitary woman, possibly a prostitute, stands against a building on the left, a single woman examines a window display, and the haunting face of another young woman seems to float across the canvas in the right foreground, creating an eerie vision of the Great White Way in wartime.

One of the cityscapes included in the catalogue underscores the dramatic change that has recently transformed the New York subject. Max Ferguson's Self-Portrait in Subway I captures a particular moment in the city's history (plate 114). The artist has painted himself sitting on a bench in a subway station. On the sign above his head, only the last letter and a bit of the letter before are visible. He is drinking coffee and looking into a graffiti-laden subway car facing him, with a single door, probably broken, open before him. The year is 1982, when the subway system was at its lowest ebb and graffiti were everywhere. Nothing in the painting suggests a moral stance by the artist or any kind of critical posture. He is simply sitting on the platform and looking intently, apparently at a viewer on the train. In small neat lettering among the graffiti to the right of the door, Ferguson has signed his name and given the year. In a way, this painting has reversed the perspective of the early nineteenth-century paintings discussed earlier. In the earlier work, it was the viewer, the spectator of the scene being depicted, who was included vicariously in the picture as a way of referring to the values of the social order. Here it is the artist who stands in for himself within the picture, as if to underscore that he is agent of everything you see here. The absence of anyone else in what seems to be a deserted station is itself ominous. If anything is being judged in this painting, it would seem to be the viewer whom he is scrutinizing. Perhaps the viewer is a potential threat? The figure of the artist, in any event, seems both a part and not a part of the situation around him, threatening and being threatened simultaneously. The artist could be almost any figure: an undercover cop, a rapist or some other kind of criminal, or simply a student waiting for a different train. What could better suggest the anonymity and the vulnerability of New York in the 1980s?

A shift in perspective that placed the artist prominently within his urban subject, as in the Kerr and Ferguson examples, underscores the magnitude of the change in paintings of New York during the past century and a half. In the early nineteenth-century paintings it was the spectator and the spectator's ideas of urban order that stood between urban reality and the canvas world of the paintings. More and more as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, it was to be the artist who interceded in urban reality and gave it a unique imprimatur. A preoccupation with civil order and aesthetic convention in earlier paintings of New York appears to have given way to formal, often abstract renderings of the urban experience just as distant from the particularities of everyday experience. See Notes