Brooklyn Bridge
c. 1927 -1930
Benjamin Eggleston (1867 -1937)
Oil on canvas, 48 1/8 X 38
Signed lower left: Benjamin Eggleston
The Robert R. Preato Collection, 91.76.7

In spite of its title, the actual subject of Eggleston's nocturne is the striking aggregate effect of downtown New York's crenellated skyline. As recorded from a vantage point on the far side of the East River, the view illustrates the advice about modern skyscrapers offered to cityscape artists by Childe Hassam in 1913, who, discounting their individual beauty, rhapsodized about the impact of their grouped silhouette against the sky. This effect, argued Hassam, was "more beautiful than many of the old castles of Europe, especially if viewed in the early evening when just a few flickering lights are seen here and there and the city is a magical evocation of blended strength and mystery."¹

The Brooklyn Bridge (with its Manhattan tower discernible at the extreme right), icon of the previous century's technological genius, plays a subordinate role in this composition, as a bordering device for lower Manhattan's densely constructed shoreline, which overruns the horizon line in defiance of its framed perspective. The vertical orientation of the canvas dramatizes the skyward thrust of the sixty-story Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway. This soaring structure, completed in 1913, not only took the title of world's tallest skyscraper away from the ornate Singer Building further south on Broadway (visible at far left) but also won a gold medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition as the "most beautiful building in all the world erected to commerce." Other recognizable landmarks are incorporated in the view, including the distinctive pyramidal roofline on the recently constructed (1926 -1927) Transportation Building at 226 Broadway, to the lower left of the Woolworth tower. The artist's objective, however, was to create a tonally harmonious whole. Here, a blue-tinged river scene merges seamlessly with the shadowed wharves of the East River. That foreground yields in turn to the architectural hillside of downtown New York, whose individualized elements seem to flicker in and out of focus, drawing the eye back to the dramatically ascending spire and golden glints of F. W. Woolworth's "Cathedral of Commerce," symbolic of New York City's corporate drive and power.²

Notes:

  1  Childe Hassam, "New York the Beauty City," New York Sun, February 26, 1913.

  2  The Woolworth Building was described in a positive context as a "cathedral of commerce" at its 1913 dedication, and the term quickly became popular.