City Hall Park and Chambers Street from Broadway
(also exhibited as City Hall Park from the Northwest Corner of Broadway and Chambers Street), c. 1825
Arthur J. Stansbury (1781 -1845)
Watercolor, 12x17
Signed lower left: Arthur J. Stansbury delin
Bequest of Mrs. J. Insley Blair in memory of Mr. and Mrs. J. Insley Blair, 52.100.16

In this watercolor of City Hall Park, Arthur Stansbury has emphasized the civic centrality of the site by giving greater prominence to City Hall than does Baron Axel Klinköwstrom's earlier work (see plate 3). On October 24, 1825, the Common Council's Committee on Lands and Places was directed to plant trees and lay out walks and spaces in the grounds at the rear of City Hall, perhaps inspiring Stansbury to paint the building from that viewpoint. The back wall of the building was built of brownstone at the behest of the Common Council in an attempt to cut costs and in the belief that New York City would never grow north of City Hall, so the brownstone would not be seen very frequently.

The American Museum, in the west wing of the Old Almshouse, was first established as the Tammany Museum in 1790 by the Tammany Society. After the Common Council took over the entire building for public offices and courts in 1830, the museum moved to its new building at Broadway and Ann Street.¹ At the other end of the Almshouse can be seen the dome of the rotunda built by John Vanderlyn (1775 -1852) in 1818 to exhibit his panorama The Palace and Gardens of Versailles.² Between City Hall and the Almshouse is the New Gaol. It was built in 1755, converted to a "hall of records" in 1829, and torn down in 1903.³

Whereas Baron Klinköwstrom delighted in the elegant people he depicted in his painting, Stansbury populated his scene with a more democratic array of figures. In addition to a child with a hoop and a couple of strolling figures, there are a vendor, a man with a wheelbarrow, another with a pick and shovel, and several carrying loads on their heads and shoulders.

Although Arthur Stansbury's career has not been thoroughly documented, there are nine ink-and-wash silhouette portraits by him at the Maryland Historical Society, and he is known to have been skilled "at cutting silhouettes with scissors, out of black paper."⁴ His finely detailed watercolors illustrated the first American botanical book, The Grammar of Botany, published in New York in 1822 by J. F. Seaman.⁵ An author and illustrator of children's books, Stansbury also executed a print titled Plan of the Floor of the House of Representatives Showing the Seat of Each Member and drew a series of New York views printed in 1828 by Rawdon, Clark and Company.

Notes:

1  For nearly a half century the American Museum had a succession of private owners, most notably P. T. Barnum, who purchased it in 1842.

2  Versailles is now installed in a specially constructed room of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A discussion of it and of the rotunda is in Kevin J. Avery and Peter L. Fodera, John Vanderlyn's Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988).

3  I.N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1928), vol. 6, pp. 534 - 535.

4  Quoted in a letter dated July 27, 1982, from Philip J. Weinerskirch, assistant director of the Burndy Library, Norwalk, Connecticut, to the National Portrait Gallery, from the files of the National Portrait Gallery Library.

5  Katherine McClinton, "American Flower Lithographs," Magazine Antiques 49, no. 6 (June 1946): 361.