Madison Square, Snow, 1904

Allen Tucker executed this painting in 1904, the year that he abandoned his career as an architect and decided to become a professional artist. The snowy setting, subtle tonal harmonies, and heavily textured paint surface of Madison Square, Snow reflect the influence of John Henry Twachtman (American, 1853 - 1902), Tucker’s former teacher at the Art Students League. It is an important early example of Tucker’s interest in tonalism, done well before he developed his mature expressionist style.

The winter cityscape depicts Madison Square Park, one of midtown Manhattan’s small urban oases. Composed from an elevated vantage point, the painting’s precedents include the bird’s-eye views of Paris produced by several of the French impressionists, such as the well-known Garden of the Princess (1867, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH) by Claude Monet (French, 1840 - 1926) and numerous paintings by Camille Pissarro (French, born St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, 1830 - 1903) from the last decade of his career. Tucker had certainly seen such French impressionist works during his extensive travels in Europe.

In the United States, Willard Leroy Metcalf (American, 1858 - 1925), Ernest Lawson (American, born Canada, 1873 - 1939), and Childe Hassam (American, 1859 - 1935) painted similar views, in which they represented the city’s public parks as genteel, bucolic places of refuge from an otherwise bustling environment.[1]  [1]
For a discussion of how American impressionist and realist painters approached these urban subjects, see H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 (New York, 1994), 155–188. Madison Square, Snow is less anecdotal and ingratiating than Hassam’s Madison Square, Snowstorm [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Childe Hassam, Madison Square, Snowstorm, 1893, oil on canvas, Collection of the Maryland State Archives or similar views by other American impressionists. Tucker’s approach to the urban park theme instead reflects the growing influence of the snow scenes of Robert Henri (American, 1865 - 1929), such as Snow in New York, and successfully combines the monochromatic, tonalist manner of Twachtman with the harsher realism of Henri.

Inspired in part by the French writer Charles Baudelaire’s notions of the painter of modern life, Tucker and other turn-of-the-century American painters were drawn to New York because of the many contemporary subjects the rapidly growing urban center provided. Madison Square had been officially designated a public space in 1847. Situated in one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods, between Madison and Fifth Avenues and extending from 23rd to 26th Streets, the park underwent a dramatic transformation around 1900 when it lost its quiet residential quality and became a major commercial and entertainment center. The area was especially noted for the presence of Madison Square Garden, a popular concert hall, amphitheater, and roof garden that was designed in a distinctive Moorish style by Stanford White and built in 1889. Its tower was surmounted by the bronze nude statue Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (American, born Ireland, 1848 - 1907), the dominant feature of Manhattan’s skyline.[2]  [2]
Gerald R. Wolfe, New York: A Guide to the Metropolis: Walking Tours of Architecture and History (New York, 1975), 197–211. Other significant buildings on the park’s perimeter included Henry Janeway Hardenbergh’s Western Union Building (1884), Napoleon Le Brun’s Metropolitan Life Insurance Building (1892), James Brown Lord’s Appellate Court Building (1900), and Daniel H. Burnham’s Flatiron Building (1902). Madison Square Park was also distinguished for its outdoor sculpture and was the site of Saint-Gaudens’s Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (1881) as well as several other important memorials.[3]  [3]
For a discussion of Madison Square Park and various paintings of it by American impressionist artists, see William H. Gerdts, Impressionist New York (New York, 1994), 76–84.

Tucker’s rendition of Madison Square Park deliberately avoids any distinctive, clearly recognizable view of the park or its environs. Tucker instead represents the park as a vestige of nature engulfed by a rising tide of relentless urban development. The only visible sign of the park is a row of motley, bare trees that protrude through the snow, sandwiched between the foreground rooftops and the tall buildings in the background. Although snow was a favorite device for romanticizing the city and imbuing it with a picturesque quality, here the metropolis is rendered more objectively. The smoke and steam rising above the New York skyline manifests the dynamic, often disruptive emerging energies of the new century.

Robert Torchia

July 24, 2024