Interior with fireplace

Images 15 & 16: Alice, age 25, in a hunter’s hat, cigarette in hand, pushes social boundaries with friends dressed as mustachioed men. Julia Martin, laughing in a boater’s hat, suggestively arranges an umbrella. Julia Bredt, hands in pockets, glares from a businessman’s top hat. Alice’s smile, unusual in her photographs, confirms that this gender commentary was good fun between close friends. The figureless interior of an historic inn at right depicts Alice’s continuing personal curiosity with a vanishing era, a theme mirrored by the story told in the painting above the fireplace of Rip Van Winkle.

Text by: Keith Glutting, art librarian, Chair of the Museums Council of New York City, captivated by Alice Austen and her vision.