Because of its literal objectivity, Snow in New York has traditionally been interpreted by art historians as exemplifying Henri’s penchant for matter-of-fact reportage of urban subjects. Such a view is reflected in Milton W. Brown’s characterization of it as “a paradigm of the new realism in American painting of the turn of the century that became known as the Ashcan school.” [8]   [8]
Milton W. Brown, One Hundred Masterpieces of American Painting from Public Collections in Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC, 1983), 124. John Walker, Paintings from America (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1951), 36, opined that Snow in New York was evidence that the Ashcan school painters were capable of “subtle tenderness” in addition to their reputation for painterly gusto and social protest, and noted its “mood of wistfulness, its nostalgia like that curious sadness which sometimes comes at twilight.” In his discussion of the closely related Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, N.Y.C.) [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] Robert Henri, Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, N.Y.C.), 1902, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection , Bruce Chambers convincingly demonstrates that Henri’s urban views are strongly influenced by the symbolist aesthetics to which he had been exposed in Paris. [9]   [9]
Bruce Chambers, “Robert Henri’s Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, N.Y.C.): An Ideal of City ‘in Snow Effect,’” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 39 (Winter 1986): 34–35. Henri listed and described Street Scene with Snow in his Record Book “A,” number 222; an entry in his diary of Dec. 5, 1902 documents that he painted the picture that afternoon. Like the symbolists, Henri sought to capture a subject’s intangible mood or essence—what he called the “effect”—rather than a literal transcription of nature, an objective he achieved during the creative process by relying on memory and mental imagery. Nevertheless, Snow in New York is a realist image that looks back to Alfred Stieglitz’s 1893 photograph Winter-Fifth Avenue [fig. 4]   [fig. 4] Alfred Stieglitz, Winter—Fifth Avenue, 1893, carbon print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection , and forward to George Bellows’s Steaming Streets [fig. 5]   [fig. 5] George Bellows, Steaming Streets, 1908, oil on canvas, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Sterling Morton for the Preston Morton Collection .
Snow in New York, 1902
Robert Torchia, “Robert Henri/Snow in New York/1902,” American Paintings, 1900–1945, NGA Online Editions, https://purl.org/nga/collection/artobject/42929 (accessed November 08, 2023).
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Overview
Robert Henri’s energetic but stark image of New York in the snow deviates from impressionist urban snow scenes of the period in several ways: it represents a common side street rather than a major avenue; there is nothing narrative, anecdotal, or prettified about the image; the straightforward, one-point perspective composition is devoid of trivial details; the exceptionally daring, textured brushwork resembles a preparatory study rather than a finished oil painting; and the somber palette creates a dark, oppressive atmosphere. In his Record Book, Henri described Snow in New York as, “N.Y. down E. on 55th St. from 6 Ave. Brown houses at 5 Ave. storm effect. snow. wagon to right.”
Having returned to New York City in 1900 following an extended stay in Paris, Henri eventually established a studio and living quarters in the Sherwood Building on the corner of West 57th Street and Sixth Avenue. In March 1902 the dealer William Macbeth encouraged him to paint New York cityscapes for inclusion in a solo exhibition scheduled for the following month. Henri hoped to produce a painting for the occasion that would achieve a degree of critical acclaim comparable to that of La Neige (1899, Louvre, Paris), a snowy view of the rue de Sèvres in Paris that had been purchased for the Musée du Luxembourg in 1899. While a buyer was found for Snow in New York, only one other work sold, prompting Henri to turn his attention primarily to portraiture.
Entry
In the summer of 1900, Robert Henri returned from a lengthy stay in Paris and rented a house in New York City on East 58th Street overlooking the East River. By June 1901 he had established a studio in the Sherwood Building on the corner of West 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, and in September he began to live there. At this point in his career, the artist occupied himself with painting cityscapes similar to those he had recently executed in Paris. In March 1902 the dealer William Macbeth encouraged him to paint New York street scenes to be included in a solo exhibition scheduled for the following month. Henri hoped to produce a painting for the occasion that would achieve a degree of critical acclaim comparable to that of La Neige [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Robert Henri, Snow (La Neige), 1899, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Photo by Gérard Blot , a snowy view of the rue de Sèvres in Paris that had been purchased for the Musée du Luxembourg in 1899. [1]   [1]
Many of Henri’s early New York cityscapes were snow scenes. Examples include East River Embankment, Winter (1900, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington), East River, Snow (1900, The Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin), and Blackwell’s Island, East River (1901, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).
Henri alluded to Snow in New York in a diary entry of March 5, 1902: “Painted snow storm. street. high houses with well of sky between. gray looming sky. brownish houses near horizon. figures. red note electric street lamp. snow.” He identified the exact subject in his Record Book: “N.Y. down E. on 55th St. from 6 Ave. Brown houses at 5 Ave. storm effect. snow. wagon to right.” [2]   [2]
Record Book “A,” no. 54. A transcription of the text and copy of the artist’s sketch of the painting from the Record Book were sent June 28, 1968, to E. John Bullard III of the National Gallery of Art by Robert Chapellier of Chapellier Galleries, New York (in NGA curatorial files). The original Record Books are owned privately. Leslie Katz has aptly described the scene as representing “the dingy, overcast mood of one of New York’s brownstone corridors, the street a thick slush of soiled and rutted snow, a sodden atmosphere animated and cheered by a lone horse-drawn wagon and two people (red splotches), under a patch of sky.” [3]   [3]
Leslie Katz, “The World of the Eight,” Arts Yearbook 1 (1957): 70. Henri’s urban snowscape is fundamentally different from those by impressionist artists of the same period (see, for example, [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning, 1897, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Katrin S. VIetor, in loving memory of Ernest G. Vietor, 1960 ): it depicts an unspectacular side street in the vicinity of his studio, rather than an imposing view of a major avenue; there is nothing narrative, anecdotal, or prettified about the image; the straightforward, one-point perspective composition is devoid of trivial details; the exceptionally daring, textured brushwork (especially noticeable in the center foreground) has more in common with a preparatory oil sketch, or pochade, than a finished oil painting; and the somber palette creates an oppressive atmosphere. Although more conventional artists exploited snow for its picturesque quality, Henri’s snow is streaked with mud and gravel, a phenomenon that he emphasized in his thumbnail sketch of the painting in his Record Book. His fluid technique conveys a sense of energy and immediacy, and reflects an extensive firsthand knowledge, gained primarily through Henri’s numerous excursions to Europe, of the art of Frans Hals (Dutch, c. 1582/1583 – 1666) , Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599 – 1660) , and Edouard Manet (French, 1832 – 1883) . [4]   [4]
For an interesting comparison, see Manet’s Effect of Snow on Petit-Montrouge, 1870, oil on canvas, National Museum Cardiff. The gloomy ambience, enlivened by only a few touches of red, is indicative of the artist’s essentially realist proclivities.
Because of its literal objectivity, Snow in New York has traditionally been interpreted by art historians as exemplifying Henri’s penchant for matter-of-fact reportage of urban subjects. Such a view is reflected in Milton W. Brown’s characterization of it as “a paradigm of the new realism in American painting of the turn of the century that became known as the Ashcan school.” [8]   [8]
Milton W. Brown, One Hundred Masterpieces of American Painting from Public Collections in Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC, 1983), 124. John Walker, Paintings from America (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1951), 36, opined that Snow in New York was evidence that the Ashcan school painters were capable of “subtle tenderness” in addition to their reputation for painterly gusto and social protest, and noted its “mood of wistfulness, its nostalgia like that curious sadness which sometimes comes at twilight.” In his discussion of the closely related Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, N.Y.C.) [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] Robert Henri, Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, N.Y.C.), 1902, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection , Bruce Chambers convincingly demonstrates that Henri’s urban views are strongly influenced by the symbolist aesthetics to which he had been exposed in Paris. [9]   [9]
Bruce Chambers, “Robert Henri’s Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, N.Y.C.): An Ideal of City ‘in Snow Effect,’” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 39 (Winter 1986): 34–35. Henri listed and described Street Scene with Snow in his Record Book “A,” number 222; an entry in his diary of Dec. 5, 1902 documents that he painted the picture that afternoon. Like the symbolists, Henri sought to capture a subject’s intangible mood or essence—what he called the “effect”—rather than a literal transcription of nature, an objective he achieved during the creative process by relying on memory and mental imagery. Nevertheless, Snow in New York is a realist image that looks back to Alfred Stieglitz’s 1893 photograph Winter-Fifth Avenue [fig. 4]   
[fig. 4] Alfred Stieglitz, Winter—Fifth Avenue, 1893, carbon print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection , and forward to George Bellows’s Steaming Streets [fig. 5]   
[fig. 5] George Bellows, Steaming Streets, 1908, oil on canvas, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Sterling Morton for the Preston Morton Collection .
Discouraged by the fact that his New York cityscapes failed to sell and increasingly attracted to figurative art, Henri ceased to paint urban subjects and resolved to become a portraitist late in 1902. In retrospect, the expressive intensity and painterly fluency of Snow in New York qualify it as one of Henri’s most accomplished works from this early period in his career. It exemplifies his advice that students should strive to capture “the romance of snow-filled atmosphere and the grimness of a house.” [10]   [10]
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit, comp. Margery Ryerson (New York, 1923), 259; quoted in Mahonri Sharp Young, The Eight (New York, 1973), 24. Such paintings give credence to John Sloan’s opinion that Henri’s landscapes and cityscapes are “too little known” and “among the finest things he did,” and it is fitting that Sloan, William Glackens (American, 1870 – 1938) , Everett Shinn (American, 1873 – 1953) , and George Luks (American, 1866 – 1933) all became distinguished painters of a genre their teacher had abandoned. [11]   [11]
Van Wyck Brooks, John Sloan: A Painter’s Life (New York, 1955), 126.
September 29, 2016
Andrew Wyeth
“I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.”
1 of 12
“I paint my life.”
2 of 12
“I like to think that I’m so far behind that I’m ahead.”
3 of 12
“Art to me, is seeing. I think you have got to use your eyes, as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn’t work. That’s my art.”
4 of 12
“Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing – then a work of art may happen.”
5 of 12
“I get letters from people about my work. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings. In fact, they don’t talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died.”
6 of 12
“The most irritating experience for an artist is to have his work criticized before it is finished.”
7 of 12
“To have all your life’s work and to have them along the wall, it’s like walking in with no clothes on. It’s terrible.”
8 of 12
“One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.”
9 of 12
“I don’t think that there is anything that is really magical unless it has a terrifying quality.”
10 of 12
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
11 of 12
“I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.”
12 of 12
Summary of Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth, one of America’s best-known Realist painters of the 20 th century, created canvases imbued with the mysteriousness of the real world, thus challenging traditional notions of reality. Wyeth rendered scenes of his everyday life in rural Pennsylvania and Maine, landscapes, and portraits with exacting detail, working primarily in watercolor and tempera instead of the more typical oil or acrylic. While famous for his realist depictions, Wyeth’s compositions often carry a sense of the uncanny, which led some critics to call him a Magic Realist. While much beloved by a popular audience and, for a time, the critical establishment, Wyeth’s reputation declined in the 1960s, as some felt his paintings did not keep up with the times and were not relevant to a contemporary culture that was experiencing various upheavals. Wyeth refused to change his style and continued painting the rural life he had always known. Later still, Wyeth became an American legend, and a touchstone for younger painters who have returned to realism to probe various issues confronting today’s society.
- Wyeth’s Realism, with its meticulous attention to detail, was not purely documentary. In particular, his compositions often employed skewed vantage points and perspectives, making his subjects seem a little uncanny, or strange. The strange perspective coupled with painstakingly controlled brushstrokes, which are the opposite of expressionistic, create a type of Realism that some critics referred to as Magic Realism. Wyeth’s Magic Realism does not traffic in fantastical subjects but instead reveals the material world to be permeated with mystery and uncertainty.
- Wyeth’s preferred media – watercolor and egg tempera – were unusual choices for a modern artist, but his innovative use of a dry brush technique in both media allowed him to build up complex surfaces on the canvas that he likened to weaving. These “woven” surfaces create the effect of a stillness, an almost surreal atmosphere, for his subjects.
- Despite living a rather rural and secluded life in Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth kept tabs on the contemporary art world, and while some critics dismissed his work as a sentimental depiction of rural life, many of Wyeth’s paintings could be considered quite radical in their exploration of the innate sexuality of his subjects, including the young Siri Erickson, the older Helga Testorf, and even his young neighbor Eric Standard, all of whom he painted unabashedly nude.
Important Art by Andrew Wyeth
Progression of Art
1942
Winter Fields
Wyeth presents the viewer with a dead crow, stiffened from rigor mortis and frozen in the wintery landscape. The viewer doesn’t look down on the crow but instead sees it as if his or her face were pressed to the ground, not far from the creature. The fields surrounding Wyeth’s neighbor’s house extend well into the distance, and a farm house and trees dot the horizon. The perspectival effect accords the small animal an outsized prominence to its setting, thus suggesting the gravity and importance of its death.
Having come across the dead bird during a walk, Wyeth brought the crow back to his studio to study and paint it, so multiple sketches for this painting exist. Wyeth remembered, “This crow in one of Karl’s fields symbolized the nature and intimacy of the Pennsylvania landscape. The blue-black of the feathers helped me break free of ‘Impressionism.'” The exquisite details that Wyeth was able to capture with tempera paint, an unusual choice of medium in modern times, underscore the degree to which Wyeth broke from the then contemporary trends of abstraction.
Painted in the midst of World War II, some have drawn parallels between the painting and the photographs of the dead and wounded in the battlefields of Europe. Additionally, Wyeth was fascinated with American movies, particularly early, silent war films made after World War I and was inspired by the filmic framing of battle scenes. Wyeth, though, insisted his work had nothing to do with photography, and upon closer inspection one sees that the objects in the farthest background are painted as delicately and intricately as the crow. In doing so, Wyeth creates a depiction of space that neither humans or cameras could capture. From an early date, Wyeth’s realism always aimed to capture, in his words “what lurks close down at the surface.”
Tempera on composition board – Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1946
Winter 1946
In Winter 1946, we see a young man running fast and recklessly down a hill. The muted colors evoke a cold winter scene, with a sliver of unmelted snow in the upper left of the composition. Bundled in warm clothing, the viewer is left wondering who this boy is and his destination.
Wyeth created this painting after the horrific death of his father N.C. It was on Kuerner’s Hill in Chadds Ford that his father was hit by a passing train. The engine stalled in N.C.’s car, and he and his young grandson were not able to move nor get the conductor to stop in time. His neighbor Karl Kuerner became a surrogate father figure to the artist, and the farm and the hill became a major source of inspiration for Wyeth’s paintings over the next thirty years.
Given the biographical context, one can now imagine the young man as Wyeth himself, running aimlessly and distractedly while trying to make sense of his father’s death. Wyeth later said he lamented the fact that he was never able to paint a portrait of his father but that “the hill finally became a portrait of him.”
Tempera on board – North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
1948
Christina’s World
With her back to the viewer, Wyeth’s subject Anna Christina Olson stares into the distance, looking out at her farmhouse in Cushing, Maine. Suffering from a degenerative muscular disease, Christina was unable to walk. Wyeth said that she was “limited physically but by no means spiritually” and that “the challenge was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.” Her gaunt arms and legs and her slight frame make the figure seem vulnerable and isolated in the expansive field, and the viewer is put in an ambiguous position, looking at her from behind. The scene contains a sense of vulnerability, contributing to a certain forboding feeling.
To say this is a true portrait of Christina Olson, though, would be misleading. While the pink dress and slim limbs belong to the then 55-year-old Olson, Wyeth used his young wife Betsy as the actual model here, thus fusing Christina’s aging and abnormal body with that of a healthy, young one. Even though Wyeth wanted to depict Olson’s plight, it can be interpreted that Wyeth made the subject an “Everywoman”.
Christina’s World presents an intriguing, open-ended narrative that appeals to the imagination. Who is Christina? Why is she in a field? Is that her house? Why does she seem to be crawling? While a seemingly straightforward painting, Christina’s World is, in fact, characteristic of Wyeth’s version of Magic Realism, which is not fantastical or overtly surrealistic but more subtle and unsettling in its hyper-realism. As one curator explained, Wyeth’s paintings “are filled with hidden metaphors that explore common themes of memory, nostalgia and loss.” And the artist himself said, “Magic! It’s what makes things sublime. It’s the difference between a picture that is profound art and just a painting of an object.”
The profundity that Wyeth was able to capture in this painting makes it one of the most well-known and admired pieces that Wyeth ever produced; however, it was not his personal favorite. Wyeth felt that the painting would have been more successful without the figure in the field. He remarked to an interviewer, “When I was painting Christina’s World I would sit there by the hours working on the grass, and I began to feel I was really out in the field. I got lost in the texture of the thing. I remember going down into the field and grabbing up a section of earth and setting it on the base of my easel. It wasn’t a painting I was working on. I was actually working on the ground itself.”
Tempera on panel – The Museum of Modern Art, New York
