Broadway in Winter
1855
Hippolyte Victor Valentin Sebron (1801 - 1879)
Oil on academy board, 11 3/4 X 17
Signed lower left: H. Sebron New York 1855
Museum purchase, 40.107

 

Sebron, a native of Caudebec, France, was one of a succession of nineteenth-century European artists who ventured to the United States in order to develop its scenic attractions into paintings geared for sale in their homelands. Crossing the Atlantic in 1849, he spent six years traversing the eastern half of the country from New Orleans to Niagara Falls, supporting himself as a painter of dioramas, landscapes, and occasional portraits.¹ New York City proved a wellspring for commissions, and during a fruitful stay there in 1854 -1855, Sebron executed a number of views of lower Broadway, arguably the nation's leading cosmopolitan avenue by that date. This compact study looks south from a point near Barclay Street, showing an urban artery astir with traffic despite evidence of a recent snowfall.

Jutting prominently into the composition at the right, with Greek Revival portico, is the five-story Astor House designed by Isaiah Rogers. A trend-setting hostelry when it opened in 1836, it featured shops at street level; 309 guest rooms, each with individual locks to ensure privacy; and the innovative luxuries of running water in every bed chamber and seventeen "bathing rooms." Glimpsed one block south is the distinctive Georgian-style facade of St. Paul's Chapel between Vesey and Fulton Streets. Almost ninety years old when Sebron memorialized it in this view, it was even then considered a venerable landmark by New York standards. The masterful Gothic revival steeple conceived by Richard Upjohn for the rebuilt Trinity Church (1846) commands the picture's midpoint, where Broadway recedes from sight near Wall Street. Across Broadway to the east, behind some winter-stripped tree branches, is the commercial block that housed various import-export businesses and the publishing offices of Thomas Y. Crowell and Company. Heading south, at the corner of Ann Street and identified by its fluttering flags, is P. T. Barnum's American Museum, New York's incomparable headquarters of hoax and continuous, captivating entertainment. Colorful flags, banners, and exterior signboards were part of Barnum's strategy to entice customers to the establishment, as was his installment of powerful entrance lights and a live band playing music from the building's balcony overlooking Broadway.²

Sebron details the undeterred motion of wintertime Broadway, animated as usual with the bustle of as sorted vehicles and intrepid pedestrians. By this date, enterprising uses of horse-drawn sleighs -most exposing passengers to the open air -had solved the problem of negotiating streets clogged with deep snow. One of the large, white, open-shell sleds used by the Broadway omnibus line under such weather conditions is shown rushing up the west side of Broadway loaded with riders.³ The speed and recklessness of these drivers were notorious enough to cause all other contenders for street access to retreat quickly from their path at the sound of the bell collars worn by the approaching six-horse teams. Opposite the public sleigh, Sebron indicates the journeys down Broadway of several smaller, privately owned sleds, three seen filled with hay that, in combination with blankets, would provide some degree of warmth to those seeking relief from the biting air.

A monumental canvas produced the same year (1855), alternatively titled Broadway, New York (Winter) or Broadway Line, now on deposit at the Château de Blérancourt in France from the Rouen Museum, dramatizes a nearly identical scene. It made a powerful impression at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 when exhibited along with several other works by Sebron. The early provenance of the Museum's painting, which was purchased in 1940, is unknown, but it carries a partial stencil in French (illegible except for "fils" and "artis") on the backing board.

Notes:

  1  See E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire . . . des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, etc. (Paris: Libraire Grund, 1976), vol. 9, p. 492, and Museum Archives. Sebron was also noted for his detailed topographical paintings of European church interiors and festive pageants mounted in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

  2  Barnum's American Museum, opened in 1841, was a brilliant makeover of a defunct enterprise known as Scudder's Museum. Under Barnum's astute promotion, the revived operation, with augmented collections, became one of the city's leading recreational destinations until fire destroyed the building in 1865. Barnum then opened another museum farther north on Broadway, which also burned, at which point he shifted his sights to the circus as a new channel for his ideas regarding popular entertainment.

  3  The appearance of these public sleighs evidently gave rise to a popular, if harassing, form of winter sport for New Yorkers on the streets, who hurled snowballs at the helpless passengers. Some of the lore associated with New York's omnibus-sleighs is discussed in John Anderson Miller, Fares, Please: From Horse-Cars to Streamliners (New York: D. Appleton, 1941), pp. 7 -8.