A City Park in Bloom

Something for winter-winter: A City Park, by William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), c. 1887. This was originally thought to be painted in Prospect Park, but it is now believed that Chase was in Tompkins Park, around the corner from where his father lived. Chase was an advocate of en plein-air painting — it shows the distance we have come since then that the idea of painting outside needed a name, and a French one at that. (Yes, yes, there are aesthetic and technological reasons, but what is America if not wide open spaces just waiting to be visualized/represented?)

Tompkins Park, named after the abolitionist NY Governor Daniel Tompkins (1774-1825, he also served two terms as U.S. Vice President, history’s sinkhole) was renamed to honor Herbert Von King (1912-1985), a long-time community activist who was also known as the “Mayor of Bedford-Stuyvesent,” in 1985. The park was the first established by the City of Brooklyn, in 1857; those stars of the Central Park and Prospect Park, the dynamic duo of Olmsted-Vaux, submitted a design for it in 1871. Nothing remains of that design — an urban parade ground of a city square — after numerous reconstructions since. According to the NY Parks history page, O&V didn’t want trees there because they would hide the “clandestine” doings of persons of bad character. And yet there were clearly trees there in late 1880s.

Sadly, for borough chauvinists, this painting finds its home in the Art Institute of Chicago. I discovered it while doing some research on Bed-Stuy, having been called upon to lend my alleged expertise to this fascinating essay by Melody Nixon.