A Winter Wedding—Washington Square,1897, by Fernand Lungren (1859-1932), was painted while he lived at 3 Washington Square North. This radiantly colored work represents a neighborhood society wedding reminiscent of Henry James's literary portrait of New York's elite. A photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals (1871-1942), the first female news photographer, entitled Washington Square North, presents an alternative view to that of Lungren's—an early morning commute of a young worker on his way to one of the nearby garment factories. She illustrates a tender and haunting image that brings to mind the tragic Triangle fire of 1911.

Like Beals, Everett Shinn (1876-1953), at one time also a news reporter, cloaked his images of the Square in atmospheric mists or hazy tonalities. Shinn pictured Washington Square more than twenty times between 1899 and 1951. In his 1929 The Arch, Washington Square, New Yorkers appear in a whirl of motion and frenetic activity, struggling to cross the street against wind-driven rain. A horse-drawn coach has just made its way under the arch—a reminder, for Shinn, of an older, more elegant New York. Drawn to the Square by Shinn, fellow Ashcan artist William Glackens (1870-1938), who had a studio at 50 Washington Square South, was among the first to depict the view from the south side of the park. Glackens is represented by ten oil paintings, one of which, The Green Car, lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features the streetcar that ran along the south and west sides of the Square. Photographer André Kertész (1894-1985) had a 12th floor apartment at 2 Fifth Avenue, which was erected in 1952 after the historic Rhinelander mansion was demolished. Like Glackens before him, Kertész pictured the Square from his window, and took advantage of his spectacular view to transform the Square into patterns of form and sinuous line.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) lived at 3 Washington Square North from December 1913 until his death in May 1965 and painted the area several times with his signature mood of solitude and silence, giving yet another interpretation of the area. In November, Washington Square, from the Santa Barbara Museum, Hopper shows us a quiet, retrospective version of the usually bustling Washington Square. In 1946, the Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) painted The Artist's Show, Washington Square, New York, on loan from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, illustrating the Washington Square Outdoor Art Show, a semi-annual event that continues today. Circles of Washington Square, a little-known masterpiece of unusually large size by Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938), represents the first skyscraper to dominate the Square, No. 1 Fifth Avenue. Like many of the skyscrapers that followed, the erection of No. 1 Fifth Avenue in 1927 was both praised and condemned, and Bluemner transforms it into something fantastic and surreal.

Fully illustrated catalogue available.