Manhattan

The son and pupil of the prominent Barbizon-influenced landscape painter John Carleton Wiggins NA, Guy Wiggins was educated in England and traveled widely in his youth. After his return to America, he began four years at the schools of the National Academy of Design, where he studied drawing from the antique, as well as from the live model. Wiggins quickly won recognition for his quiet, luminous landscapes rendered in an Impressionist technique. Wiggins and his wife settled permanently in Old Lyme, Connecticut, although Wiggins continued to spend time in New York, painting his snow scenes of the city, for which he is best known.

The city was a favorite subject for Wiggins, and this panorama of the Manhattan skyline seen from New Jersey emphasizes the density of buildings and contrasts the verticality of them with the horizontal areas of water and sky. Unlike Wiggins' slightly later impressionist and often sentimental scenes of snowfall in New York, "Manhattan" is painted with a much more striated brushstroke. The palette is relegated to the cool tones that suggest a winter's day on the Hudson River while the billowing smoke from the tugboats punctuates the painting with gritty staccato bursts of white.