View of Hudson River
c. 1840 -1845
Victor Gifford Audubon (1809 -1860)
Oil on canvas, 441/2 X69
Inscribed on reverse: View of the Hudson River at about 134th St. from a painting by Victor Audubon, a son of Audubon the naturalist, who is sitting on a rock in the foreground (about 1840 -1845).
Gift of Miss Alice Lawrence, 38.188

 

The property commemorated in this view by Victor G. Audubon belonged to John Burling Lawrence, great-grandfather of the painting's donor and the man to whom the artist gave the canvas. Manhattanville, as the area around 125th Street and Broadway was then known, was established in 1806 along the Hudson. By mid-century the village, which had grown to about five hundred residents, sported an Episcopal Church, a mill, a brewery, and a backdrop formed by the natural beauty of the then-untouched Palisades. Victor Audubon, the elder son of the noted naturalist and painter John J. Audubon (1785 -1851; according to the inscription on the reverse of the painting, Audubon senior is the figure seated on a rock at the foreground of the painting), lived with his family at "Minnielands," their home overlooking the Hudson River at 155th Street, about two miles north of this scene. In the early nineteenth century, this area of Manhattan became a summer setting for the country homes of wealthy New Yorkers who lived downtown the rest of the year.¹

Since the 1850s, deposits of excavated earth from New York City's burgeoning building projects have contributed to the expansion of Manhattan's shoreline along both the East and Hudson Rivers, thereby obliterating the beach in this view. Audubon depicted other elements in the scene with great attention to detail. The sailboat in the right center is a Hudson River gaff-rigged sloop, favored for transporting both freight and passengers along the river; the boat with furled sails is a schooner. The fishermen's equipment lying on the beach -notably the cotton fishing net and the basket of split white oak -appear close in style to those in use for river fishing today. Among the identifiable fish lying on the beach are striped bass, bluefish, and fluke, all species readily available in the Hudson River at the middle of the nineteenth century but later eradicated by industrial pollution. The hauling of nets that the men in this canvas are performing would have taken place at first light during low tide. The shadows cast on the beach by the rising sun and the down-river position of the moored boat's stern reflect those circumstances. The choppy water indicates that a stiff breeze is blowing, probably making for a cool early morning and explaining the layers of clothing worn by the figures in this scene.²

Notes:

  1  Christopher Gray, "A Restored Memorial to Two Who Died on the Titanic," New York Times, real estate section, August 23, 1998.

  2  Research information supplied from a conversation on August 19, 1993, with Christopher Letts of the Hudson River Foundation. The lush tree foliage and tufts of grass on the beach indicate summer.