Ernest Lawson's Great Bridge Pictures.
Odes to New York's most important bridge--it's not the one you think.
Ernest Lawson, Harlem River at High Bridge, c. 1915, collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
In 1898, the city of New York grew radically by consolidating the outer boroughs into one megalopolis, and the artists of New York celebrated a new era of urban romance. Brooklyn was the fourth largest city in the country at the time, so you might think that its famous bridge, completed in 1883, was a locus of celebration. It wasn’t. (Joseph Stella’s iconic paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge began twenty years later, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s great meditation on the scene wasn’t executed until the middle of the twentieth century). The most advanced urban realists of the day focused, instead, on Harlem River crossings.
II. The biggest since Homer.
Ernest Lawson came to the Art Students League of New York from his native Halifax by way of Kansas City. He studied under John Henry Twachtman at the League before heading to the Académie Julian in Paris. His years in France confirmed his Impressionist technique—he painted outdoors, capturing light in broken strokes of pure color—and within a few years of his return to America, he had radicalized this technique into his mature style, laying on thick, messy piles of raw paint. They are intensely painted—think Chaim Soutine or Anselm Kiefer—but their subjects are romantic, pretty even. Lawson’s balance of intensity and romance earned Robert Henri’s praise as “the biggest [landscape painter] we have had since Winslow Homer.”1 In 1898, Lawson moved his home and studio to the most picturesque part of New York: Washington Heights. What the cathedral at Rouen was to Monet, High Bridge was to Lawson.2
III. You know nothing, John Snow.
That’s High Bridge, a bridge you have almost certainly never traversed—the most important bridge in the city in the 19th century.
Two major scourges haunted Gotham in the 1830s—both, it turned out, with the same solution. In 1832, cholera came to town; it killed thousands, and some sizable fraction of the city’s quarter-million people fled the island in fear. What causes cholera? Epidemiology; the germ theory of disease; hand-washing—these were not yet a thing. 1832’s best minds blamed bad air, the weak character or the poor, and immigrants. Meanwhile, John Snow of Old York,3 was treating a cholera outbreak in an English coal-mining village; he came to hypothesize that the source of the disease wasn’t “vapors” or racial inferiority, but tainted water.
New York was distracted from cholera by the other 19th century scourge: fire. In 1835, 15 acres and seven hundred buildings burned to the ground. This was a perennial problem: lots of American cities burned down, and this is only one of New York’s three “Great Fires.”4 But the conflagration highlighted a problem: despite being surrounded by water, the Manhattan didn’t have a great water source—not safe for drinking and not pressurized for fire-fighting.
James Renwick, Jr.5 proposed one solution to two problems: a system of reservoirs, and an aqueduct from upstate to feed them. Renwick’s team designed a simple gravity-feed from Croton, forty miles up state, modeled after a Roman aqueduct. The Croton River was dammed to make a high-elevation lake; its nineteen billion gallons of water would then flow through pipes over masonry-enclosed aqueducts downstate, descending a foot per mile, over a high bridge over the Harlem River, and finally to reservoirs in Manhattan. On the Manhattan side of the un-creatively-named High Bridge, a turret-style stone water tower was constructed to house and further pressurize additional water. The whole aqueduct system was begun in 1837 and in use eleven years later.
That system has been expanded and rerouted—the Croton Dam was considerably enlarged at the end of the century, and much of the aqueduct’s path was rerouted—but today, the city is fed from the same reservoir by the same gravity system. Several of High Bridge’s stone arches were replaced by a higher steel span, and the tower was decommissioned during World War I for fear of sabotage. The Croton Dam today is the third largest hand-hewn stone structure extant—the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China are larger. The size of the venture sketches the magnitude of the problem: the city burned again in 1845, before the aqueduct went live; and the source of cholera wasn’t confirmed until the 1850s, when Snow’s work in London effectively began the field of epidemiology. The city still has ninety-nine problems, but since 1848, water for drinking and fire-fighting hasn’t been one.
That’s the view that Lawson was capturing, again and again, from 1898, to about 1915: a wonder-of-the-world style public-works project that transformed the city from hellish, squalid cesspool, to a civilized modern city. They appear bucolic, shimmering, and generally empty, but Lawson’s bridge pictures are indelibly connected to the vibrant urban life that Robert Henri celebrated downtown. In 1908, Lawson exhibited alongside Henri and other urban realists as one of the Eight at Macbeth Galleries, an association that earned him Henri’s plaudit as “the biggest since Homer.”
Thanks for reading.
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
As quoted by Jochen Wierich, “Ernest Lawson: Nostalgia for Landscape,” in The Eight and American Modernisms, 2009, p. 80.
The great ones are in great public collections: the De Young, the National Gallery, the Whitney, the Phillips Collection, etc.—but sadly, many are not on view.
Not the John Snow you’re thinking of, but thanks to Jessie Singer’s great book There Are No Accidents, whose gloss on Snow and the advent of epidemiology brought this to my brain, along with so much else.
For more on the great fire of 1835, check out our article on Alfred Maurer’s father, here.
You know his name from another of his early projects, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “castle” building, which is formally known as the Renwick Building.