‘City Street in Moonlight’ – Lewis Eilshemius, 1908
Inside this gaslit anachronism of a house, Eilshemius raged at an art establishment that mostly ignored him and wrote endless letters to New York City newspapers attesting to his genius.
He also painted. Shunning the artistic trends of the era, he created darkly romantic, almost surrealistic nudes and landscapes that reflected a “sinister magic,” according to one critic covering a retrospective of his work in 1977.
One luminous example is the nocturne above, from 1908, plainly titled “City Street in Moonlight.”
Where is this scene? It’s almost impossible to know for sure, as Eilshemius wasn’t a documentarian but an artist who reshaped reality with his own idiosyncratic vision and imagination.
But if I had to guess, I’d say Times Square.
Broadway had streetcars in 1908, and the streetlamp and billboard on top of a tall structure in the distance would have been characteristic of Times Square’s early 20th century emergence as a center of entertainment and nightlife.
Though his work continues to be largely unknown, by the end of his life in 1941, Eilshemius had earned the appreciation of critics he’d previously eschewed.
“A feisty rebel and a tireless iconoclast, he never painted to satisfy the fashions of his day, but only to please his own strange and sometimes nightmarish vision,” stated his New York Times obituary.
That long and detailed obituary also described him after his death from pneumonia in a Bellevue psych ward as “penniless, bitter, and famous.”
—
Source credit: Ephemeral New York, Esther Crain
‘Chronicling an ever-changing city through faded and forgotten artifacts.’
Notes: This is a repost of from one of the most fascinating blogs I read. I never fail to be amazed by native New Yorker, Esther’s detailed histories and backstories behind the nooks and crannies, signs, treasured buildings, people and places in New York. Her site has given rise to two books, 2014’s New York City in 3D in the Gilded Age and The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.
