John Sloan, The City from Greenwich Village, 1922. Oil on canvas.
Sloan described the personally
meaningful site: “Looking south over lower Sixth Avenue from the roof of my
Washington Place studio, on a winter evening. The distant lights of the great
office buildings downtown are seen in the gathering darkness. The triangular
loft building on the right had contained my studio for three years before.”
Painted in 1922, this nocturnal
vista of Lower Manhattan, seen from the roof of his Greenwich Village studio,
is regarded as the culmination of Sloan’s city scenes. In his own description
of the picture, Sloan stated that it “makes a record of the beauty of the older
city which is giving way to the chopped-out towers of the modern New York.”
Sloan has commented on the artifice of the modern city by including the
Moonshine advertisement on a building at the lower left. This fictional brand
is a reference to the illicitly distilled and distributed liquor that was
popular during Prohibition. The truncated moon graphic evokes what the city’s
artificial electric lighting so effectively obscures: natural moonlight.
Despite Sloan’s critical attitude toward urban modernization, the painting
possesses a magical quality, as one looks over the elevated train tracks on
Greenwich Village’s lower Sixth Avenue toward the eerily illuminated
skyscrapers—the Woolworth Building and Singer Tower—on the horizon.