黑料不打烊

American painter Jane Peterson (1876-1965) is not particularly easy to classify both in terms of style and themes. Some of her works resemble those of Maurice Prendergast in their dappled, kaleidoscopic colors; others evoke the classic American Impressionists William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam with their feathery brushstrokes and creamy pastel hues; others, in their flat swathes of fluorescent color limned by thin dark lines are kin to Milton Avery’s abstracted landscapes; still others allude to her familiarity with European expressionist, Fauvist, and Nabi paintings. And in terms of subject matter, Peterson’s hundreds of works include glorious floral still lifes, leisurely beach scenes, modernist portraits of women, Gloucester fishing boats and docks, and evocative slices of life from her prodigious travels domestic and abroad.

Jane Peterson in her studio.

Even amidst all of this diversity, there is a consistent subject that shows Peterson at her best: New York City. While she left it often for work, art, and pleasure, she commented fondly “no matter where I go, I always want to come back to New York.” Born in Illinois, the young artist knew she had to seek training in the art capital of America, and after taking an art aptitude test sponsored by Pratt Institute, she moved to Brooklyn to attend the school and make her way in the art world. She studied with the influential teacher Arthur Wesley Dow and was a classmate of Agnes Pelton and Max Weber. Following Pratt she worked as a drawing supervisor in Brooklyn public schools and continued her education at The Arts Students League. Eventually, she married a wealthy New Yorker, Bernard Philipp, and though the couple traveled widely, her home base was her apartment and rooftop studio on Fifth Avenue.

Jane Peterson, Williamsburg Bridge, n.d. Gouache on paper.

Peterson’s New York paintings, perhaps unsurprisingly, are varied in terms of their subject matter. Many capture a rapidly changing modern city – buildings of glass and steel rising higher and higher, the boroughs connected by gleaming new bridges, automobiles and elevated trains zooming in and above the streets, scintillating new forms of entertainment for the masses like Luna Park. In From the Artist’s Studio on Fifth Avenue (n.d.), the leafy landscape of Central Park is dwarfed by the vertiginous surrounding buildings. Williamsburg Bridge (n.d.) shows the titular bridge, which was completed in 1903 and was for almost two decades the longest suspension bridge in the world, from street level, arcing across the East River. Like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg connected the two boroughs and made the passage of people and commerce faster than ever.

The efficiency and celerity of the modern city are also represented in Peterson’s paintings of Wall Street. New York was the American, and eventually global, capital of finance and business, and Peterson conveys that through the crowded, curving street and the sidewalks filled with people engaged in conversation or clearly on their way to work. In one version, probably completed after the Allied victory in WWI, there are several American flags proudly fluttering in the famous street, symbolically uniting democracy and capitalism. 

Jane Peterson, The Mott Street, n.d. Gouache on paper.

An older New York is present too, represented by brick buildings with rusted fire escapes, colorful pushcarts, teeming streets, and worn wooden docks and boats. In Mott Street (1916), Peterson places the viewer amid strolling mothers and children and groups of men conversing. The tenements are rendered in salmon pink, mint and white, and muddy brown, charming but a little rundown. This is not a wealthy neighborhood, but Peterson does not strive for Ashcan grit. She is interested rather in the subtle beauty that can be found in the juxtaposition of people and place, the combination of the old and the new that urbanist Jane Jacobs extolled the merits of in her work The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation – although these make fine ingredients – but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.”

The Ghetto (1916) depicts one of New York’s “rundown” immigrant neighborhoods, probably in the Lower East Side. The denizens and their wares block much of the view of the street, and the viewer can almost hear and smell the sounds and scents of the area. Above street level, laundry flaps in the breeze on several of the fire escapes, reminders that in the city, boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, home and street are porous. 

Jane Peterson, Central Park, 1918.

A final notable theme in Peterson’s work is the pastoral charm of the city, represented by its verdant parks and quiet squares. In one watercolor and ink scene of Central Park, a horse-drawn carriage rolls along a quiet path, the buildings surrounding the Park tucked well in the background. In another work there are no discernible people at all, only swathes of lambent green suggesting a pond and a scrim of delicate trees hiding the buildings.

Jane Peterson, Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, 1922. Gouache and charcoal on paper.

Riverside Park features in another lovely, arcadian work, Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (1922). The elegant spires and arched windows of the cathedral occupy only the top third of the canvas, the rest given over to a wall of chartreuse foliage and a slender walking path flanked by bushes and a tall tree, stippled with various shades of green. Union Square (c. 1930) is more emphatically embedded in the city, but the square is remarkably peaceful, with only a few strollers and a cheerful flower cart. Clearly, despite the hustle and bustle of a city that never sleeps, there are places to seek solace and serenity.

Jane Peterson’s New York paintings offer us many New Yorks – an old city constantly infused with the new, a dense urban environment populated with exquisite green spaces, a city at work and a city at play – but what remains constant throughout all of her renderings is her deep affection for it. It isn’t hard to see why whenever she left New York she wanted to come back.

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