Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

The sandy strip that became New York City's playground belonged originally to Gravesend, a town established in 1643 by a band of English colonists. Their individual holdings were divided and re-divided among descendants, farmers who paid scant attention to the five miles of non-arable beach to the south.²

In 1829, with construction of a shell road, a bridge from the mainland to the island, and an inn named the Coney Island House, New Yorkers began to regard a trip to Coney Island, especially one aboard a breeze-cooled steamer, as an enticing summer escape from the city. At first the domain of the wealthy and prominent (early visitors included Washington Irving, Jenny Lind, and Walt Whitman), Coney Island's further development inevitably brought social changes. By the beginning of the Civil War, it had become a place for romantic assignations and a destination for boatloads of day-trippers of dubious social standing who often behaved rowdily. The opening in 1869 of the earliest train connection, the Brooklyn, Bath and Coney Island Railroad, enabled more visitors to travel there at cheaper rates, assuring the resort a continuous summer flow of middle-class New Yorkers.

In this view of one of America's earliest seaside resorts, probably taken from further east on the island, Sanford Gifford used a horizontal format to emphasize the gently curving beach and lapping waves of the summer seascape. The arrangement of sea, sky, and beach, with only the distant buildings (hotels, bathing pavilions, and other resort delights) for vertical accent, represent elements of Gifford's approach to his many representations of the south-shore beaches of Long Island in the 1860s and 1870s. The softly diffused atmospheric illumination, the great expanses of sea and sky resonant with the effects of light and atmosphere, and a carefully plotted geometric composition combine to achieve the illusion of a motionless moment.

Notes:

1 The painting's previously assigned date of c. 1870 has been, through identification of the clothing on the women walking the beach, shifted more accurately to 1862 -65.

2 Edo McCullough, Good Old Coney Island: A Sentimental Journey into the Past (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), pp. 18 -20.


Coney Island c. 1862 -1865¹ Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823 -1880) Oil on canvas, 11 X 21 1/2 Signed lower left center: S. Gifford (signature followed by illegible date, c. 1860s) From the collection of the late Claudius Conant, lent by his daughter Sarah Conant Ostrom (Mrs. Homer Irvin Ostrom), 1935, and by his granddaughter Virginia Ostrom, 1942, L1449
The sandy strip that became New York City's playground belonged originally to Gravesend, a town established in 1643 by a band of English colonists. Their individual holdings were divided and re-divided among descendants, farmers who paid scant attention to the five miles of non-arable beach to the south.² In 1829, with construction of a shell road, a bridge from the mainland to the island, and an inn named the Coney Island House, New Yorkers began to regard a trip to Coney Island, especially one aboard a breeze-cooled steamer, as an enticing summer escape from the city. At first the domain of the wealthy and prominent (early visitors included Washington Irving, Jenny Lind, and Walt Whitman), Coney Island's further development inevitably brought social changes. By the beginning of the Civil War, it had become a place for romantic assignations and a destination for boatloads of day-trippers of dubious social standing who often behaved rowdily. The opening in 1869 of the earliest train connection, the Brooklyn, Bath and Coney Island Railroad, enabled more visitors to travel there at cheaper rates, assuring the resort a continuous summer flow of middle-class New Yorkers. In this view of one of America's earliest seaside resorts, probably taken from further east on the island, Sanford Gifford used a horizontal format to emphasize the gently curving beach and lapping waves of the summer seascape. The arrangement of sea, sky, and beach, with only the distant buildings (hotels, bathing pavilions, and other resort delights) for vertical accent, represent elements of Gifford's approach to his many representations of the south-shore beaches of Long Island in the 1860s and 1870s. The softly diffused atmospheric illumination, the great expanses of sea and sky resonant with the effects of light and atmosphere, and a carefully plotted geometric composition combine to achieve the illusion of a motionless moment. Notes: 1 The painting's previously assigned date of c. 1870 has been, through identification of the clothing on the women walking the beach, shifted more accurately to 1862 -65. 2 Edo McCullough, Good Old Coney Island: A Sentimental Journey into the Past (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), pp. 18 -20.