Le coin de Waren [sic] et de Greenwich. Dessiné en janvier 1809. Pendant la neige
[The Corner of Warren and Greenwich. Drawn in January 1809. During Snow], 1809
Baroness Anne Marguerite Henriette Rouille de Marigny Hyde de Neuville (c. 1761? -1849)¹
Watercolor, 13x7
Inscribed at bottom: Le Coin de Waren et de greenwich. Dessiné en Janvier 1809. Pendant la Neige.
Bequest of Mrs. J. Insley Blair in memory of Mr. and Mrs. J. Insley Blair, 52.100.6

Sleigh riding was a time-honored New York City custom, having been introduced by the Dutch in the seventeenth century as an efficient means of winter transportation for both people and goods. Snow-packed streets muffled the sound of approaching sleighs, to the extent that pedestrians would sometimes be run down and even killed by these silent conveyances. As late as 1908 the city was passing ordinances requiring that each sleigh be equipped with bells to alert the unwary.

In this small watercolor by the Baroness Hyde de Neuville, drawn and painted as one of a group of New York City scenes, the routine urban activities of a middle-class neighborhood are recorded on the day of a snowfall.² Several figures pick their way along the unshoveled streets, while some remain indoors, observing the passing activity from windows. A woodcutter carries his equipment through the street, shoppers arrive and depart from the corner store at the far right, and children amuse themselves with a small sled. The view chronicles an era when simple, two-story wooden houses, such as those documented by Hyde de Neuville, combined the functions of family home and business. Later in the century, Greenwich Street, which starts at the Battery and continues north to the junction of Gansevoort and Little West 12th Streets, became a fashionable area as brick mansions replaced such earlier structures. Today, a large apartment house, a school, and assorted businesses occupy the corners at the intersection of Greenwich and Warren.

Baron Hyde de Neuville and his wife had been exiled from their native France for his outspoken loyalty to the Bourbon regime. Between 1807 and 1814 the Hyde de Neuvilles traveled the eastern United States from Wilmington, Delaware, to Niagara Falls, and the Baroness seized the opportunity to record what she saw along the way, using skills traditionally taught to an aristocratic young Frenchwoman.³ The Baroness probably observed this commonplace but nonetheless charming New York scene from the Warren Street residence into which she and her husband moved soon after their arrival in the United States. Despite inaccuracies in perspective and scale, the straightforward account provides a glimpse of early nineteenth-century New York. Following the restoration of the French monarchy, the couple returned to France and came back to the United States in 1816, when the Baron was named French minister to Washington, D.C.

Notes:

1  Gloria Deak, in "Banished by Napoleon: The American Exile of Baron and Baroness Hyde de Neuville," Magazine Antiques 136, no. 5 (November 1988): 1148 -1157, gives this birth date, but Richard Koke, in American Landscape and Genre Paintings in the New-York Historical Society (New York and Boston: New-York Historical Society in Associate with G. K. Hall, 1982), vol. 2, p. 189, cites sources stating that the Baroness was one hundred years old when she died.

2  Several of these works -including another view of the same corner, studies of Broadway opposite Chambers Street, and studies of New York Harbor -are in the I. N. Phelps Stokes collection at the New York Public Library. Another group of scenes recording sites in other eastern states is in the collection of the New York Historical Society.

3  Many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century painted views of New York City were the work of competent upper-class European amateurs like the Baroness, who were either visiting or newly immigrated.