Ralph Gardner. Jr. takes a walk in Central Park with the author of ‘Painting Central Park’
ENLARGE
Canaletto’s views of Venice are wondrous in their precision. Turner’s take on the Thames is hallucinatory (if you like Turner. And hallucinating). Pissarro’s paintings of the Tuileries and the Seine transport you to Fin de siècle Paris.
But if you were being honest with yourself, wouldn’t you prefer a painting by one of these masters of your own home or backyard, or by just about anybody else who knew how to wield a paintbrush?
I’ve always been slightly frustrated by how hard it is to find paintings of some of my own favorite destinations. For example, the Hudson River School artists were mesmerized by the Catskills, but rarely turned their easels around to paint Columbia County, where I spend weekends.
But finally there is a new book that depicts my real backyard. It’s called “Painting Central Park” (Vendome). It’s by Roger Pasquier, a lifelong New Yorker who has done a distinguished job—including going through decades of American painting auction catalogs in the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—of tracking down works of the park by artists ranging from George Bellows and Childe Hassam toRichard Estes and David Hockney. The accompanying text is almost as illuminating as the art.
I knew I was going to enjoy the book as soon as I saw its cover. It’s a 1941 painting of the Sheep Meadow—at least I thought it was the Sheep Meadow until Mr. Pasquier corrected me during a walk through the park last Tuesday afternoon—by Adolf Dehn called “Spring in Central Park.”
It also happens to be the first “art” postcard I bought as an adolescent, probably attracted by a subject I knew well (and the Central Park South skyline behind it) and could easily project myself into.
That sensation is reproduced every time you turn the page: The Bethesda Fountain. The bridle path where it ducks until a tunnel in front of the Dakota. The Great Lawn. The Conservatory Water where children sailed toy boats in a 1890 William Merritt Chase painting and still do. The Mall with its orchestrated rows of towering trees.
Part of the fun of the book is trying to orient yourself in each painting. That can present a challenge because the skyline has changed so much since the park opened in 1857, because some of the structures are long gone—fountains, gazebos, etc.—and because artists occasionally took poetic license with the subject matter.
Our walk began at Grand Army Plaza, and with a slight disagreement. I don’t consider the plaza, or the book’s 1995 Estes painting “Equestrian Statue of General Sherman by Augustus Saint Gaudens Viewed from a Bus” part of Central Park.
“But it’s the entrance to Central Park,” Mr. Pasquier argued.
We made our way to the Mall, depicted in a sun-dappled 1901 Jay Edward Hambidge scene of men in straw hats and women carrying parasols. There’s also a work of the south end of the Mall, Edward Hopper’s 1935 “Shakespeare at Dusk.” The title refers to a statue of the bard on the Mall’s Literary Walk.
Even though the surrounding skyline has grown immensely since then, the scene is instantly recognizable because of the quality of light. The park’s moods, like those of a person whose personality was set long ago, don’t seem to have changed all that much.
I’m also attuned to them because the Mall is where I played every day as a child, the fading light warning us it was time to head home for dinner.
Mr. Pasquier played elsewhere.
“What was there to do here?” he asked, of the Mall.
Lots.
ENLARGEHe stuck closer to his East 73rd Street home. “I used to roller skate down that hill,” he said, referring to the steep descent from the entrance of the park at 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue to the Conservatory Water, though we all called it the model boat pond.
We also stopped at the exact location, overlooking Bethesda Fountain with The Beresford apartment building in the background, where Reginald Marsh painted a watercolor of young women who looked like they’d come a long way since those depicted in a 1901 Maurice Prendergast painting looking up those same steps.
We finally made our way to the location of that Adolf Dehn painting I always assumed was of the Sheep Meadow.
The subject is actually the field just north of the Sheep Meadow. Mr. Pasquier held up the book, and perfectly matched the rock outcroppings to those in the painting.