Self in the City: Highlights from the Collections of the Hudson River Museum and Art Bridges

Although cities are known for their towering buildings and busy streets, they often contain man-made parks and open squares, where commerce flourished during their genesis in the Gilded Age.

William Hahn gives us insight into the hustle and bustle of New York’s Union Square in the late 1870s, which was the heart of the theater district at the time. In front of the peaceful park filled with well-dressed figures leisurely strolling and reading, the less fortunate newsboys struggle to snatch their stacks of the Daily Evening News from the horse carriage.

Individuals go about their day in small groups, with the few connections between different social classes defined by the unequal norms of the era. A servant or nanny pushes a baby carriage; the cap and apron mark her as a worker. At lower right, a girl seems to console a boy while two women conversing next to them ignore the situation. Hahn shows that even on a street corner with many commercial and social opportunities, class division in cities can create feelings of alienation for individuals.

Yonkers, where the Hudson River Museum is located, owes its colonial settlement to the Saw Mill, or Nepperhan, River, which flowed into the Hudson and provided waterpower. It became a center of manufacturing and jobs for new residents long before the arrival of the railroad and coal powered machinery in the mid-nineteenth century.

Factories along the river dictated the location of housing for workers and managers, many of whom walked to work. Seen here, a small lunch establishment, possibly on Ashburton Avenue, feeds people who cannot make it home for the midday meal but might have time for a break.

With painterly brushwork, Allen captures the gleam of rainwater on pavement and the reflections of anonymous pedestrians braving the weather. Against the potential isolation of a city, a bright spot of red attracts our attention to the woman sharing an umbrella with her child, and two men greet each other under the shelter of the luncheonette porch, where the proprietor is in the open window, ready for business.

Daniel Putnam Brinley grew up in Cos Cob, a picturesque enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut, that was the home of an American Impressionist art colony from about 1890 to 1920. During a trip to Europe from 1904 to 1908, Brinley met, and was influenced by, the American Modernist painters John Marin and Max Weber. His mature work blends the bright colors of Impressionism with newer tendencies of bolder delineation, flattened forms, and structured composition. He exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 and was instrumental in organizing the Armory Show, which introduced European Modernism to America.

Brinley, like many of his contemporaries, was intrigued with the architecture and activity of urban manufacturing—seeing its man-made grandeur as an industrial idyll. With strong lines and bold colors, his factory dwarfs the natural beauty of the Palisades, as well as the anonymous figures on the street, barely indicated with minimal brushstrokes. Plumes of smoke mix with steam from the train and river boats, filling the sky and adding energy to the painting.

Such scenes remind us that, at the time, cities were magnets for migration from rural areas and abroad because of the many opportunities for work in factories.

In this image, Jacob Lawrence depicts himself at work in his adopted city of Seattle, where he moved in 1971 to teach art at the University of Washington. Lawrence never forgot the flourishing and supportive art community of his early career. Interviewed about the window view in this image he said: “These buildings back here bring somewhat of the tenements of New York. In reality, this [view] is an empty wall. So I decided to put that back . . . as a sort of symbol of my thinking of the big city of New York.”

Inside the room, Lawrence surrounds himself with examples of his work, which also reflect his nostalgia for New York City and the culture he left behind. On the wall behind him is a representation of People in Other Rooms, a Harlem street scene painted in 1975. The painting at the lower right, Builders #3, 1974, features carpenters, a frequent subject of his New York years. Woodworking was a field open to Black men, and Lawrence associated that creative process with his own work.

This image combines three areas of interest Barbara Morgan pursued in the late 1930s: photography, modern dance, and the overwhelming scale of New York City, which she said “engulfs its people.” Here, Morgan employs photomontage, the art of layering two or more images, to express the multiplicity of forces and human drama she found there. One of Morgan’s few images that combines dance and urban life, this winter view is probably taken from her studio window.

The dancer, superimposed with tulips representing the hope of a coming spring, is Erick Hawkins, a key figure in the Martha Graham Dance Company. His pose is from Graham’s dance piece American Document, during which a narrator intoned: “This is one man/ this is one million men/ this man has a power. It is himself, and you.” Near the end of the Great Depression, Morgan takes this moment from the dance to show how an individual can point the way forward for a group of people, who appear, though her juxtaposition, to follow his assertive lead into a new beginning.

Standing on a crowded, underground subway platform is a distinct feature of life in New York City. When the Sixth Avenue elevated railway (the “El”) closed in 1939, six years before this work was painted, newspaper columnist Harriet Fitts Ryan dreaded that she would be forced to take the subway, to “join the mad rush and breathe its foul air.” She contrasted the close underground quarters, where “there is nothing to see but the tired face opposite,” with the sunny urban landscape seen from the El.

This painting is figural, but Lewis’ composition is distorted and deconstructed by his experiments with abstraction. The shallow space and flattened forms are reminiscent of Cubism, and the way he manipulates line and color and textures the paint with sand makes the figures fade into their environment, a sense one may feel in city crowds.

This painting depicts Manhattan’s skyline when Susan Hall was living in Greenwich Village. It references not only a physical location but what she calls “the ‘home’ inside all of us, which we are always seeking, leaving, journeying to or exploring.”


Hall was born and raised in Point Reyes, California, moving to New York City in 1970 when the Feminist Art movement was emerging. She found a strong community of avant-garde artists centered in SoHo while teaching at various schools, including Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers. After two decades, she returned to the West Coast. Since then, she has used the word “home” in numerous titles and references, including books about her paintings, Home Before Dark (2004), and her life, River Flowing Home, A Creative Journey (2010).

Moving Home evokes multilayered connections to a city, and how the relationship between city and self can change over a lifetime. Although Hall does not depict any figures, she asserts, “What represents human beings more than the idea of a physical house that we dwell in or where we want to live . . . or nostalgia for where we used to live?”