- US dollars
Sunset on 57th Street
Peninsula Hotel III
- 43 x 30 undefined
$5,000
US dollars
"Peninsula Hotel III" focuses on a pair of sculpted figures flanking the bull's-eye window above the main entrance on West 55th Street in New York City. It is the third in a series painted from this facade, following earlier paintings of the individual figures, and the first to include the circular window, an opening that seems to lead somewhere else. The building opened in 1905 as the Hotel Gotham, designed by Hiss & Weekes, former employees of McKim, Mead & White and faced in limestone to harmonize with McKim's University Club directly to the south. At twenty-three stories, it was among the earliest of the "skyscraper hotels" and one of the first in the city built on a steel frame. The original venture lasted only three years. The Gotham was foreclosed in 1908, having failed to obtain a liquor license. Agriculture and the hunt, provision and plenty, set above the door. The figures are Ceres and Diana. Ceres tips her head back, a cornucopia at her shoulder; Diana wears a crescent moon in her hair and keeps one hand on her bow. Both sit on the outward scrolls of a broken pediment. The painting holds everything in warm cream and ochre except the window, which runs from turquoise to a pale glow at its center. The brightest passage in the picture is the opening itself. * Framing: Framed; frame not shown * Room view: For scale and presentation only
January, 2013
Watercolor painting
Figure, Effigy, Landmark, NYC
- US dollars
$5,000
US dollars
the University Club of NY
- 20 x 20 undefined
- US dollars
$3,300
US dollars
This watercolor focuses on the carved head of Pallas above the main entrance of the University Club at 1 West 54th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Set within an elaborate arrangement of scrolls, foliage, and classical ornament, her pale face emerges from the architecture under the warm light of night. The University Club was designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1899, an Italian Renaissance palazzo modeled on the Strozzi Palace in Florence. McKim clad it in pink granite instead of the expected white marble, and composed the facade so the building reads from the street as three grand horizontal levels. The seals of eighteen universities are carved across the facade. All three partners of the firm were members of the club, designing their own clubhouse. The painting is built around a restrained contrast of warm gold and cool gray-green. The light rises from below, from the entrance beneath: the chin, throat, and leaves below the face hold the brightest passages, while the brow and upper eye sockets drop into shadow. The close cropping removes almost all sense of the building's monumental scale, leaving Pallas suspended within the curves and foliage around her. A goddess of wisdom, set above the entrance to a club chartered in 1865 for the promotion of literature and art. * Framing: Framed; frame not shown * Room view: For scale and presentation only
February, 2011
Watercolor painting
Effigy, Landmark
- US dollars
$3,300
US dollars
Sunset on 57th Street
- 28 x 21 undefined
- US dollars
$3,800
US dollars
“Sunset on 57th Street” looks up at a terracotta head above a window at 163–165 West 57th Street, a face crowned with grape clusters and vine leaves. The building was raised in 1916 for Louis Chalif, a ballet dancer from Odessa who arrived in New York in 1904 and opened his school the following year, directly across from Carnegie Hall. He called the building his temple to Terpsichore. His architects, George and Henry Boehm, covered the facade in polychrome terracotta and filled it with imagery of the theater: masks, lyres, faces, griffins, urns. The grapes and vine leaves belong to Bacchus, whose followers danced. 57th Street runs east to west, and late in the day the sun comes straight down it. The painting is split by that light. The brick on the left burns gold; on the right it falls into blue-purple shadow. The face is caught at the divide, warm on one side and cool on the other. A trade magazine wrote in 1916 that the new building had "a golden charm that is all its own." A century of owners later, the terracotta is barely altered, and on a clear evening the phrase still describes it exactly. * Framing: Framed; frame not shown * Room view: For scale and presentation only
August, 2008
Watercolor painting
Face, Effigy, Landmark
- US dollars
$3,800
US dollars