The Queensboro Bridge

c. 1935
Blendon Reed Campbell (1872 -1969)
Oil on canvas, 40 X 54
Signed lower right: Blendon Reed Campbell
Gift of Mrs. Alice C. Flenner, 71.121

 

"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. . . .'Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge . . . anything at all.'"¹ Campbell's painting, which presents the 1909 Queensboro Bridge as an entryway into a park-like waterfront and an immaculate, orderly cityscape, concretizes F. Scott Fitzgerald's description in The Great Gatsby (1925). With his use of muted, pastel colors, Campbell further depicts Fitzgerald's portrait of "the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money." By arching the bridge against this exciting background as it soars above the clearly industrialized but tidy Queens shoreline in the foreground, Campbell emphasizes the linkage created by the bridge between Manhattan, Welfare Island in the middle, and Queens. It also imparts Fitzgerald's sense of dazzling promise. Campbell's optimism is difficult to fathom, given that he created the work in the depths of the country's worst depression. Stylistically it clearly relates to its period, in the nearly Precisionist rendering of the elements of structures, boats, and vehicles, reflecting the efforts of an American painter to follow modernist trends. The painting was shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts during the 1930s in an exhibition titled The Bridges of New York.²

Blendon Reed Campbell, born in St. Louis, studied in Paris with James McNeil Whistler in his short-lived art school, and with Paul Albert Laurens and Jean-Joseph Constant. Campbell's work included illustrations for newspapers and magazines, printmaking, and portrait and landscape painting. During the Great Depression years, he executed prints and paintings for the artists' programs of the Public Works Administration.

Notes:

  1  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; reprint, New York: Collier, 1992), p. 73.

  2  Alice C. Flenner (daughter of the artist), letter dated July 14, 1971, to Mr. Joseph Noble, Museum Archives.