City Streets

Last spring in a post about painting cities I mentioned that something around 80 percent of the United States population lives in urban centers. Actually, it's "cities and suburbs" that comprise that percent of the population. So it makes sense for artists to think about making pictures of the places where most of us live. Photographers have known for years how vivid and evocative city images can be. Painters do too. It's interesting to view city scenes by others over the centuries.

Vermeer painted his "Little Street" in 1657 or so. This quiet little street in Delft still exists. Although there has been some dispute as to the exact location of this house, it seems clear now that it belonged to a relative of Vermeer. This is in fact a representation of a real city street. Vermeer captures the facade, windows and doors with a wonderful accuracy, so much so you feel as if you can step into the street and hail the woman in the side entry.

Less than a century later, Giovanni Canal, better known as Canaletto, made a handsome living selling his cityscapes (or veduta)--vistas of Venice and later London. During the 18th century, many Europeans made a Grand Tour, which almost always included Venice. Like tourists today, they brought home images of their travels, cheerfully painted and hawked by Canaletto and his colleague Francesco Guardi in Venice. This example, a view of the Piazza San Marco painted in 1735, is in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. This sort of proto-photorealism was and is understandably very popular.

In the 19th century, as urbanization and the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, city subjects became more and more common in painting. Perhaps the quintessential city painter was Gustav Caillebotte, who knew and painted with the group known as Impressionists, but whose style was considerably more finished and academic. Caillebotte was often concerned with the linear perspective of city streets and the machine-like repetition of things like bridges and rooftops. His best known cityscape is the enormous "Paris Street, Rainy Day," completed in 1877, around the time when Monet's soft-focus Impressionism began. 

Cityscapes continue to fascinate me, too. My most recent foray into the subject is a 9x12 oil on panel,

"Snow, The Village," oil on panel, 2018

completed for a show in New York. "Snow, The Village," shows a blowing snowstorm along a Greenwich Village street. Two pedestrians huddle beneath an umbrella, no doubt ruefully eyeing the warmth projected from the old windows. It was fun working in the various color combinations and complements. The umbrella was just a coincidence and wasn't influenced by Caillebotte.





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