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

The throbbing night life of Times Square, hailed as the country's nocturnal "amusement center," was the wonder of tourists by the time this painting was produced in 1940. Guidebook writers marveled at the ceaseless flow of people through it and considered the garish, synthetic glow of the Great White Way especially memorable. "The scene is cheap and tawdry, yet impressive and stimulating," waxed a typical description of the era aimed at sightseers, which went on to inventory the square's medley of attractions: theaters, movie houses, restaurants, shops, and "flashing, glittering, multi-colored light-pictures advertising the Nation's products."¹ Stokely Webster defied such predictable imagery in Times Square, however, by offering an impression of the district in a quieter, morning mood.

Looming in the distance, like the advancing prow of a gray battleship, is the New York Times building, with its moving belt of electric bulbs spelling out fast-breaking news temporarily extinguished. The construction in 1904 of this wedge-shaped corporate tower at the triangular intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and 42nd Street had been a catalyst in transforming the formerly undistinguished commercial locale known as Longacre Square into a pivotal crossroads of entertainment, transportation, shopping, and communication thereafter formalized as Times Square.² The marquee of Loew's State, the only theater in the square presenting regular vaudeville shows, is partially visible to the left, its flickering lights also stilled. The bright red light of a streetcorner traffic signal, broadcasting its warning to absent throngs, underscores the square's curtailed pace of activity. Only a concession stand (in the picture's left foreground) appears awake for business, along with a few ghostly pedestrians whose reality is barely substantiated by the artist's fleshless brushstrokes. Without benefit of its nocturnal wardrobe, the famed hub assumes an intriguing air of drabness accentuated by the unforgiving effects of sunup on Times Square's jumble of commercial buildings, novelty stalls, darkened billboards, and lifeless theater facades.

As a child, Stokely Webster left his Evanston, Illinois, birthplace to travel with his family to Paris, where he was enthralled by the paintings of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and embarked on his own fledgling efforts at plein-air cityscapes. After returning to America in 1924, he dedicated the next ten years to educating himself through a succession of art-school courses, studying architecture at Yale and spending two years in Chicago working as a textile designer. In 1936 he studied for six months with Robert Henri's disciple Wayman Adams, learning the rigors of portrait painting and honing his landscape technique, which combined the high-valued colors of Impressionism with the luxurious painterly means of Henri and John Singer Sargent. A one-man exhibition, which opened in New York the same year he completed Times Square, rewarded him with gratifying reviews: "Mr. Webster paints in the way that at one time was thought the only way to paint, using the flowing strokes and well-thinned-out pigments that came to us through Sargent via Frans Hals and Velasquez," admired a critic in the New York Sun. A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune endorsed that opinion, comparing Webster's technical skills to those of Sargent, while others praised his expertise at capturing the momentary impression of a place and his exceptionally convincing and precise use of light as the force defining its mood, climate, and urban disposition.³

Webster's joy at this reception, which buttressed his ambition to focus on painting full time, was savored only briefly. The outbreak of World War II had soon shifted him to the assembly line at Grumman Aircraft Corporation, leading to his pursuit of an engineering degree at Columbia University and seven years of steady employment designing airplanes. He returned to painting in 1948, having sublet a spacious studio, formerly owned by George Luks, in Manhattan. A freak fire ravaged this building four years later, however, destroying more than sixty of his canvases and cheating Webster of his successful re-entry into the city's art world. The incident prompted him to relocate to Huntington, Long Island, where he became involved as a designer, and then president, of a gyroscope manufacturing company. Webster's creative inclinations eventually lured him back into active painting, and the decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw him creating both landscapes and figural studies and exhibiting that work internationally in an array of salons and galleries. During this time, Webster's paintings were acquired by, or donated to, museums in the United States.⁴ His commitment to painting lyrical seascapes and city scenes in an Impressionist manner continued unabated, and museum exhibitions featuring recent work by the artist were still being organized into the mid-1990s.⁵

Notes:

1 New York: A Guide to the Empire State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 260 -261.

2 Longacre Square was a local designation owing its origin to the cluster of carriage and harness shops that once predominated in the area. Its name derived from a district in London where carriage factories had been concentrated. Following the laying of the cornerstone for the new Times building in January 1904, the city renamed the intersection Times Square, which today defines a much larger section of midtown Manhattan anchored by the original triangular site of the newspaper's early twentieth-century headquarters.

3 For more extensive commentary about Webster's artistic abilities in relation to the work shown in this solo exhibit, see Henry McBride, New York Sun, February 10, 1940, and Carlyle Burrows, "Two American Realists," New York Herald Tribune, January 2, 1940; the other American realist evaluated in this essay was Ernest Fiene (see plate 100).

4 A fine summary of Webster's career and the influences that shaped it is supplied by Harry Rand in the exhibition catalogue Stokely Webster: Paintings, 1923 -1984 (Daytona Beach, Fla.: Museum of Arts and Sciences, 1985), pp. 5 -22.

5 For example, Webster's paintings were the subject of a monographic exhibition presented at the Hammond Museum in North Salem, New York, May 8 -June 20, 1993.


Times Square 1940 Stokely Webster (b. 1912) Oil on canvas, 24 X 20 Signed lower right: Stokely Webster Gift of the artist, 75.4
The throbbing night life of Times Square, hailed as the country's nocturnal "amusement center," was the wonder of tourists by the time this painting was produced in 1940. Guidebook writers marveled at the ceaseless flow of people through it and considered the garish, synthetic glow of the Great White Way especially memorable. "The scene is cheap and tawdry, yet impressive and stimulating," waxed a typical description of the era aimed at sightseers, which went on to inventory the square's medley of attractions: theaters, movie houses, restaurants, shops, and "flashing, glittering, multi-colored light-pictures advertising the Nation's products."¹ Stokely Webster defied such predictable imagery in Times Square, however, by offering an impression of the district in a quieter, morning mood. Looming in the distance, like the advancing prow of a gray battleship, is the New York Times building, with its moving belt of electric bulbs spelling out fast-breaking news temporarily extinguished. The construction in 1904 of this wedge-shaped corporate tower at the triangular intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and 42nd Street had been a catalyst in transforming the formerly undistinguished commercial locale known as Longacre Square into a pivotal crossroads of entertainment, transportation, shopping, and communication thereafter formalized as Times Square.² The marquee of Loew's State, the only theater in the square presenting regular vaudeville shows, is partially visible to the left, its flickering lights also stilled. The bright red light of a streetcorner traffic signal, broadcasting its warning to absent throngs, underscores the square's curtailed pace of activity. Only a concession stand (in the picture's left foreground) appears awake for business, along with a few ghostly pedestrians whose reality is barely substantiated by the artist's fleshless brushstrokes. Without benefit of its nocturnal wardrobe, the famed hub assumes an intriguing air of drabness accentuated by the unforgiving effects of sunup on Times Square's jumble of commercial buildings, novelty stalls, darkened billboards, and lifeless theater facades. As a child, Stokely Webster left his Evanston, Illinois, birthplace to travel with his family to Paris, where he was enthralled by the paintings of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and embarked on his own fledgling efforts at plein-air cityscapes. After returning to America in 1924, he dedicated the next ten years to educating himself through a succession of art-school courses, studying architecture at Yale and spending two years in Chicago working as a textile designer. In 1936 he studied for six months with Robert Henri's disciple Wayman Adams, learning the rigors of portrait painting and honing his landscape technique, which combined the high-valued colors of Impressionism with the luxurious painterly means of Henri and John Singer Sargent. A one-man exhibition, which opened in New York the same year he completed Times Square, rewarded him with gratifying reviews: "Mr. Webster paints in the way that at one time was thought the only way to paint, using the flowing strokes and well-thinned-out pigments that came to us through Sargent via Frans Hals and Velasquez," admired a critic in the New York Sun. A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune endorsed that opinion, comparing Webster's technical skills to those of Sargent, while others praised his expertise at capturing the momentary impression of a place and his exceptionally convincing and precise use of light as the force defining its mood, climate, and urban disposition.³ Webster's joy at this reception, which buttressed his ambition to focus on painting full time, was savored only briefly. The outbreak of World War II had soon shifted him to the assembly line at Grumman Aircraft Corporation, leading to his pursuit of an engineering degree at Columbia University and seven years of steady employment designing airplanes. He returned to painting in 1948, having sublet a spacious studio, formerly owned by George Luks, in Manhattan. A freak fire ravaged this building four years later, however, destroying more than sixty of his canvases and cheating Webster of his successful re-entry into the city's art world. The incident prompted him to relocate to Huntington, Long Island, where he became involved as a designer, and then president, of a gyroscope manufacturing company. Webster's creative inclinations eventually lured him back into active painting, and the decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw him creating both landscapes and figural studies and exhibiting that work internationally in an array of salons and galleries. During this time, Webster's paintings were acquired by, or donated to, museums in the United States.⁴ His commitment to painting lyrical seascapes and city scenes in an Impressionist manner continued unabated, and museum exhibitions featuring recent work by the artist were still being organized into the mid-1990s.⁵ Notes: 1 New York: A Guide to the Empire State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 260 -261. 2 Longacre Square was a local designation owing its origin to the cluster of carriage and harness shops that once predominated in the area. Its name derived from a district in London where carriage factories had been concentrated. Following the laying of the cornerstone for the new Times building in January 1904, the city renamed the intersection Times Square, which today defines a much larger section of midtown Manhattan anchored by the original triangular site of the newspaper's early twentieth-century headquarters. 3 For more extensive commentary about Webster's artistic abilities in relation to the work shown in this solo exhibit, see Henry McBride, New York Sun, February 10, 1940, and Carlyle Burrows, "Two American Realists," New York Herald Tribune, January 2, 1940; the other American realist evaluated in this essay was Ernest Fiene (see plate 100). 4 A fine summary of Webster's career and the influences that shaped it is supplied by Harry Rand in the exhibition catalogue Stokely Webster: Paintings, 1923 -1984 (Daytona Beach, Fla.: Museum of Arts and Sciences, 1985), pp. 5 -22. 5 For example, Webster's paintings were the subject of a monographic exhibition presented at the Hammond Museum in North Salem, New York, May 8 -June 20, 1993.