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Homage to the Square |
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Washington Square North by July 1920 Vintage gelatin silver print 10 x 8 inches (25 x 20 cm.) |
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Beals moved to New York from the Midwest in the spring of 1905. Soon after her arrival she settled at 159 Sixth Avenue and embarked on an ambitious lifelong project to document the city "in its many 'Moods and Tenses.'" Beals' series, which she titled "The Souls of the Cities," includes photographs of the landmarks and streetscapes of Greenwich Village. Commercial assignments kept Beals from devoting much time to her series until the years 1915 to 1920. Her images of the Square from this period are among her most Pictorialist . They are deliberately unfocused and suffused with a dreamy romanticism. Beals achieved a blurred effect by interposing a sheet of celluloid between the printing paper and the negative. Identical images are sometimes printed in varying tones or colors. Washington Square North was created by July of 1920. Beals liked to photograph in Washington Square at night as well as on snowy, misty, or rainy mornings. The scene represented here was, according to writer and area resident Pietra Van Brunt, one of the most distinctive early morning sights in Washington Square Park during the early decades of the last century. It represents one of the young immigrant workers who probably resided in the area passing through the park on their way to neighborhood's garment-making establishments. In 1915, Van Brunt remarked on them: "They come like sleepwalkers, were it not for the heavy bundles of clothing carried on one shoulder or perchance the head. Their bodies are all twisted and awry as their feet scuff along the pavements, their eyes heavy from their all night vigil, that houses on lower Broadway may have their bundles of finished buttonholes and they may have the pennies with which to live in order to sew more" (Pietra Van Brunt, "Washington Square," Forum 53 [May 1915]: 593). | ||