The Ferries, New York

Colin Campbell Cooper spent much of the first decade of the twentieth century documenting New York's transformation into a modern metropolis, and this painting belongs to a body of work that placed him among the foremost American painters of the urban scene. Trained in Philadelphia and later in Paris under Impressionist-influenced instruction, Cooper returned to the United States and found his great subject in the steel, stone and steam of Manhattan. American Impressionism, as practiced by Cooper and his contemporaries in the Ten American Painters circle, adapted the broken touch and colour-as-light principles of Monet and Pissarro to the gritty vitality of American commercial life. The ferries themselves were then the indispensable arteries of New York commerce: before the great bridges and tunnels multiplied, thousands of workers, traders and travellers crossed the harbour daily on vessels exactly like the one Cooper places so prominently in his foreground. The painting records a world on the cusp of change, the old ferry culture already in tension with the rising towers that would eventually make it obsolete. Cooper exhibited widely during this period, showing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at major Impressionist salons, and his New York harbour paintings were among his most admired works.