Madison Square
1900
Joseph Oppenheimer (1876 -1966)
Oil on canvas, 30 X 34
Signed lower right: Jos. Oppenheimer
Gift of the artist, 50.165

 

The seven-acre Madison Square, bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenues, Broadway, and 23rd and 26th Streets, opened on May 10, 1847.¹ Having served as a paupers' burying ground and a military parade ground before its nineteenth-century metamorphosis into a gracious park, the tract became the object of extensive improvements. Between 1847 and 1851, the Common Council voted funds to supply Madison Square with new grading and lawn seeding, an enclosing fence, benches, and gas-fired street lamps. In 1857 a granite monument honoring General William Jenkins Worth, by Henry Kirke Brown (1819 -1886), was installed on a small plot on Fifth Avenue opposite Madison Square. In 1876 two bronze statues were dedicated: one, the work of Augustus St. Gaudens (1818 -1907), honoring Admiral David G. Farragut, and another, by Randolph Rogers (1825 -1892), in memory of William H. Seward.² In 1867 a fountain spraying water from the Croton Aqueduct system was moved from City Hall Park to Madison Square. The handsome area rapidly became a stylish locale for the homes of wealthy New Yorkers.

As with most fashionable New York neighborhoods, the infiltration of commerce into Madison Square forced its residents to seek ever-more-northerly residential outposts. By the 1890s a multitude of shops along the side streets and Sixth Avenue encroached on the elegant homes around the square. Construction of the Metropolitan Life Building in 1890 -1893 and Stanford White's Madison Square Garden in 1890 (the "Garden" is the twin-turreted white building visible above the trees at the extreme right of the square) gave the square an increasingly commercial aspect.

In 1902, when the Flatiron Building replaced the row of buildings seen along the right side of the painting, this view of the square from the south became something of a historical curiosity. Thereafter, artists -painters, printmakers, and photographers -tended to position themselves on the north side of the square in order to incorporate a view of this new, oddly shaped skyscraper.

Joseph Oppenheimer was born in Würzburg, Germany, and studied at the Munich Academy of Art from 1892 to 1894. He then traveled for several years in Europe and the Middle East and made his first trip to New York in 1900, the year this painting was executed. The source for the painting, a photograph in the family archives in Montreal, appears to have been taken from the studio Oppenheimer rented at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.³ In Germany, Oppenheimer frequently exhibited portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and interiors. Some cityscapes, the fruits of his travels, also appear. His European Impressionist training enabled him to take full advantage of the compositional possibilities offered by the open spaces of Madison Square. He used a muted palette to depict a winter storm -softened cityscape in which the more vivid yellow of the centrally placed trolleys provides a contrasting focal point.

Notes:

  1  In 1814, an area of 240 acres, which had served as an arsenal, barracks, and potter's field, was pared down to 6.8 acres and named for President James Madison.

  2  William Henry Seward (1801 -1872) served as governor of New York State from 1839 to 1843 and was secretary of state under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson during the Civil War and for some years after.

  3  Ms. Helaine Sicotte, curator for the family archives and their extensive holdings of Oppenheimer paintings, generously supplied a copy of the undated photograph, quite probably by Oppenheimer himself, now in the Museum Archives.