Snow in New York

Henri painted this canvas in New York, where he had relocated from Philadelphia after leading the circle of urban realists who would eventually exhibit together as The Eight in 1908. By 1902 he was teaching at the New York School of Art and absorbing the raw energy of a city that the genteel tradition of American art largely declined to look at directly. Snow in New York belongs to a body of street paintings Henri made in those years under the direct influence of American Realism and in conscious dialogue with the rapid, gestural method he had studied in the work of Velazquez, Hals and Manet. His approach here is documentary in feeling but painterly in execution: broad, unhesitating strokes that capture a specific atmospheric condition rather than composing a view for beauty's sake. The painting entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it remains one of the most cited examples of the Ashcan School's argument that the working city, in its cold and its noise and its routine, was a subject fully equal to any European landscape. Critics at the time divided sharply over whether such pictures were art or reportage; that argument has long been settled in Henri's favour.