Flat Iron Building

The Flatiron Building, completed in 1902, was one of the most photographed and painted structures of its era, and Cooper was among its most attentive chroniclers. Working in the tradition of American Impressionism and closely aligned with the Ashcan-adjacent interest in the modern city as a subject worthy of serious pictorial attention, Cooper brought to New York the broken-stroke plein-air sensibility he had refined during studies in Philadelphia and Paris. This canvas belongs to a sustained series of skyscraper paintings that Cooper produced in the first decade of the twentieth century, works now held in institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Flatiron itself, designed by Daniel Burnham and praised and feared in equal measure as a reckless experiment in steel-frame height, made the same kind of argument for the new century that Cooper was making on canvas: that the American city, raw and teeming, was a subject as worthy as any European boulevard or Normandy haystack.