Label Text:
"Our park will undoubtedly be, one of these days, one of the finest places of the kind in the world," a Harper's Weekly writer predicted when this print was published in the magazine on September 15, 1860. Winslow Homer's hectic and sweeping panorama of New Yorkers enjoying a drive in the park vividly portrays the city's newfound fascination with Frederick Law Olmsted's landscaping genius as well as the rise of a media culture interested in illustration, news, and sensation. Although Central Park was not yet finished in 1860, prints such as this satisfied extreme public curiosity about the park and depicted for viewers the intensive use of the space as well as the social classes that were able to frequent it. Homer, one of the foremost magazine illustrators of his time, worked as a freelance illustrator for Harper's from 1857 to 1875, producing a large body of Civil War wood engravings as well as this type of genre scene-subjects that would later surface in his paintings. Here we see a print of reportorial nature. The densely populated image is full of anecdotal scenes (note, for example, the dog racing under his master's carriage or the two soldiers in the lower left), dry wit, and an interest in changing customs, fashions, and values.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1950.77.59 |
