Skating in Central Park
1865
Johann Mengels Culverhouse (1820 -c. 1891)
Oil on canvas, 193/4 X 35 1/8
Signed lower right: J. M. Culverhouse, 1865
The J. Clarence Davies Collection, 29.100.130

 

This crisp and lively panorama of skaters at the Lake near the center of Central Park was painted only seven years after Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux submitted their "Greensward Plan" to New York's City Council. The Lake's twenty-acre setting proved congenial to this winter recreation, and in 1863 Central Park's commissioners, departing from their usual neutral prose, issued a congratulatory report noting the aesthetic consonance between skating and the park's landscaping: "The movements of a throng of skaters, on a clear day, chasing each other over the crystal ceiling of the imprisoned lake, & the dusky foliage of the fir and pine on the adjacent heights, wrapped with wreathes of fleecy white; leafless branches strung with a fairy network of icy pearls & form in our midst a winter scene unmatched by that of any capital or country of modern times."¹

Johann Mengels Culverhouse, born and raised in Rotterdam, immigrated to New York City sometime before 1849, when he began to exhibit genre subjects, largely rustic tavern and marketplace scenes, at important art venues in New York and several other cultural capitals on the East Coast. Although he resumed his art career in Europe during the Civil War years, he was back in New York by the mid-1860s, associating himself with a local publisher of engravings while selling his oils and showing periodically at the National Academy of Design. Culverhouse's partiality for moonlit scenes and artificially illuminated interiors led to his reputation as a deft "candlelight painter" in the Dutch and Flemish traditions.

Another marketable talent that Culverhouse brought to New York was his expertise as a painter of skating scenes. Between 1865 and the late 1870s he produced many pleasing variations on the theme of decorous crowds testing their abilities on ice -by day and after dark, on urban ponds and on country creeks, in picturesque American locales and in such foreign surroundings as the Bois de Boulogne and the canals of his homeland. His landscapes of Central Park in winter, of which this late-afternoon view is a prime example, demonstrate the acuity of details and romantic temperament that merge in this ice-skating series.² Here, practitioners perform the well-rehearsed rituals of gliding, coaching, observing, and occasionally falling in a pastoral theater betraying few clues, beyond the skaters' fashionable attire, of its city situation. The golden pink rays of approaching twilight, and the dusting of snow that mutes the park's surrounding terrain and support structures, heighten the scene's gaiety. The warming house, partly visible at far left, marks the site where the Terrace and Bethesda Fountain would soon take form. On the hillside to the left is a rustic summerhouse, which no longer exists. In the distance, the arch of Bow Bridge is discernible, supporting its original ornamental vases atop end posts, which were later removed.

Culverhouse's painting was featured, together with several other canvases by him, in the fall 1877 exhibition of the Brooklyn Art Association. Little is known about his life thereafter, but it was peripatetic if the wide range of his place-specific landscapes is a reliable measure. He is presumed to have been actively working in the United States until around 1891.³

Notes:

  1  Document quoted in Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Theodora Kimball, eds., Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect: Central Park as a Work of Art and as a Great Municipal Enterprise (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1928), p. 66. In 1866, one year after Culverhouse painted this scene, an official guidebook to the park calculated that 555,668 people had skated on the Lake in the month of January alone. See T. Addison Richards, Guide to Central Park (New York: James Miller, 1866), p. 57.

  2  Culverhouse exhibited a work of the same subject titled Moonlight in Central Park at the National Academy of Design in 1865. Other dated ice-skating scenes of the park by Culverhouse are known, including an 1869 moonlit view of the Lake looking toward the Ramble from the south side of Bow Bridge (collection of Beacon Hill Fine Arts, New York, as of 1996). These represent some of the earliest painted views of Central Park; on this point, see William H. Gerdts, Impressionist New York (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), pp. 126 -127.

  3  Culverhouse painted landscapes in Syracuse, Riverhead, Utica, and Trenton Falls, New York, in the Wissahickon Creek area of Philadelphia, and in other locations in the eastern United States; he also depicted scenes in his native Holland and in Paris. For a biographical summary of his career, see the entry for Culverhouse's Skating on the Wissahickon (1875) in Natalie Spassky, American Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2 (1816 -1845) (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), pp. 131 -134; and Museum Archives.