Two very different scenes painted from an 1889 artists studio building on Eighth Avenue
The Romanesque top windows, the light-colored bricks, the classical columns between window panes: Even behind a tarp and scaffolding, sometimes you just know a building has a noteworthy past.
Turns out 939 Eighth Avenue, on a gridlock-prone stretch of Columbus Circle between 55th and 56th Streets, was one of the first studio buildings in New York City intended as work and living space for artists.
Opened around 1889 and named after Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck, the Van Dyck Studios became an early anchor of the arts district that sprang up at the turn of the century along 57th Street.
The Van Dyck Studios “housed the Grand Opera Society of New York and the American School of Miniature Painting, along with studios for forty to fifty artists—primarily painters but also sculptors, musicians, and dancers,” explains the New-York Historical Society.
“It stood around the corner from Carnegie Hall, which included 180 artists’ studios in its towers. Together, these two buildings formed one of the main art communities in late-nineteenth-century New York City.”
The Van Dyck “set the stage for the development of such purpose-built artist residences as the West Sixty-seventh Street artists’ studios—home at various points to Gifford Beal, Ludwig Bemelmans, Norman Rockwell, and LeRoy Neiman—as well as the Rodin Studios (200 West 57th Street), the Studio Building, and the Gainsborough Studios (222 Central Park South),” the New-York Historical Society continues.
I’ve not been able to find any interior shots of the Van Dyck Building. But perhaps that’s not as important as what some of the resident artists saw—and painted—outside those enormous windows.
“View From the Van Dyck Studios” (above) by Eliot Candee Clark, “presents rear brownstone exteriors as seen from 939 Eighth Avenue, where Clark shared a studio with his father and then kept one of his own from 1906 to 1922,” notes the New-York Historical Society.
It’s a moody winter scene from the back of the building, but from the security of his studio, Clark isn’t suffering from cold and snow exposure.
“Dusk reduces the background buildings into shadowy silhouettes of gray barely visible against the pale gray sky. Icicles hang from the ventilation shaft, and snow blankets the rooftops and fire escape,” per the New-York Historical Society. “Yet the painting hints at warmth and homeyness: several windows glow yellow against the winter, suggesting refuge from the elements.”
A generation later, Minnesota-born painter Lucile Blanch had a studio in the Van Dyck. Back in March, I posted a painting by Blanch, “Eighth Avenue and 56th Street,” depicting a street scene from 1930, when the neighborhood was becoming an automobile showroom district and less of an arts district.
A reader, Bob, commented that the vantage point was likely from the Van Dyck, as Blanch and her then-husband shared space there.
Unlike Clark, who faced the back, Blanch looked out the front of the building—giving us this wonderfully rich street scene of small, anonymous people dwarfed by the enormous modern city.
[Third image: New-York Historical Society]
