Private Collection, New York
Gift to the present owner from the above, circa 1998

Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, Everett Shinn: The Spectacle of Life, November 2000-January 2001, pl. 4, pp. 22, 171, illustrated in color p. 116

Very good condition. Mat burn along all 4 edges. Small losses to the board along extreme edges, 1 quarter-sized loss in the center top edge. An incomplete drawing with the artist's signature on the reverse.
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Everett Shinn began his artistic career as a newspaper illustrator, working for numerous publications in both Philadelphia and New York City. Requiring great observational discipline and speed, journalistic illustration instilled the young artist with a stylistic and technical foundation he would utilize for the rest of his life. Indeed, he acquired and honed his signature ability to accurately portray the complexities of urban life and its inhabitants while working in this profession.

By the final years of the 19th century, however, Shinn began to limit his periodical illustration in order to paint and draw independently full-time. From 1898 until his trip to Europe in 1900, the metropolitan streets of Manhattan became his primary subject. In selecting this theme, he joined a host of other 19th century artists whose imaginations were captivated by the newfound modernity of New York City. Deeply influenced by his teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, Robert Henri, who encouraged his students to capture the realities of everyday living, Shinn distinguished himself by focusing his attention on the floods of people who were pour𓄧ing into the city from all over the world. He took to wandering the city streets to find subject matter, observing and recording a multifaceted vision of New York.

Executed in 1899, Park Scene is a quintessential example of Shinn’s preferred style and technique from this period, when he was primarily concerned with the representation of public space as sites of cultural exchange, as the city's urban streets, parks and squares provided the only points of interplay between the social classes. Park Scene illustrates this interest, but is perhaps most notable for the virtuosity Shin🌸n displays in his application of pastel.

Shinn's focus on these themes in this period coincided with his almost exclusive use of the pastel medium. Although due to the rising popularity of Impressionism pastel had recently experienced a general revival, Shinn’s work demonstrates not only a departure in subject matter from its conventional treatment, but also a radically different technique. In a limited palette of black, white, and brown, Shinn renders a vivid picture of one of Manhattan’s many public parks on a cold winter day. Exhibiting a wide range of impressionist technique, its surface becomes a forum through which Shinn explores pastel’s fluidity and versatility. The rapid, vigorously applied strokes Shinn utilizes to render the winter trees and weather eschews the soft palette and blended execution preferred by many of his contemporaries. His originality, however, garnered attention: “Shinn is a master of pastel,” proclaimed a 1906 review. “He knows thoroughly both the possibilities and the limitations of his medium. The material is never strained in endeavoring to get too much out of it; and if technically his pastels are great achievements, pictorially they are also” (quoted in Janay Wong, Everett Shinn: The Spectacle of Life, New York, 2000, p. 18).