I’m not sure what part of Park Avenue painter Louis Michel Eilshemius depicts here. But I don’t think it matters.
He’s captured the orangey glow and foreboding solitude that can be seen and felt all over city streets at dusk in the fall.
In the catalogue for an exhibition of Eilshemius’ work at the National Academy of Design in Washington in 2001, the writer, Steven Harvey, comments:
“On the horizon there is a far off sparkle of the lights at the end of Park Avenue, muted in the soft gray atmosphere of night. It is a metropolitan vision at once barren, tough and yet strangely comforting. The ambivalence that Eilshemius felt in regard to New York as home is evident it his vision of the city.
“The isolation he personally felt is represented in his view of the city as a sparkling metropolis, largely uninhabited place for solitary evening walks.”
Tags: Autumn Evening Park Avenue Eilshemius, Louis Michel Eilshemius, New York in 1915, New York painters, paintings of Park Avenue, Park Avenue in 1915, visionary painters New York City
Ephemeral New York 
September 27, 2013 at 11:37 am |
This must be a few block north of Madison Square Park, looking south. Maybe 28th or 29th street.
September 27, 2013 at 11:31 pm |
Beautiful painting! Love to read your blog – I always learn something. Eilshemius is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery and Green-Wood owns some of his work. Once the Weir Greenhouse is restored, they will be exhibited there, along with works of otother artists buried in Green-Wood.
September 28, 2013 at 1:41 am |
Thanks Ruth. He’s one of many notable New Yorkers residing in the Green-Wood necropolis.