Object Type: Painting

Medium and Support: oil on canvas

Credit Line: Florence Griswold Museum; Purchase

Accession Number: 2015.13

Writing in 1918, the author of an article about Guy C. Wiggins’s impending departure for service in Europe during World War I wrote, “One day in his studio in New York city overlooking Lincoln Square, he grew tired of the landscape he was painting from a sketch made in the country in the summer. Happening to look out of the window he saw a light snow being blown over the view of city square, office buildings and elevated railroad tracks. Dropping his work on larger canvass [sic] he made a sketch of the Lincoln Square snow storm and in a few days he had completed a picture that is one of the best things he has done. This picture alone would have made his career a success.” Several years after its creation and exhibition at the National Academy of Design, and after it was already in the possession of Helen Hartley Jenkins, Wiggins’s Lincoln Square, Winter was recalled as highlight of the artist’s oeuvre. Impressive in its scale and demonstration of Wiggins’s newfound enthusiasm for depicting urban life, the painting marks a key moment in the development of a subject matter with which his name would become synonymous, snowy views of New York City. Wiggins had painted the picture from his studio at the Miller Building, 1931 Broadway, a structure on the west side of the avenue, near 65th Street, from which he could look northeast toward the elevated station of the IRT at the intersection of Broadway, Columbus Avenue, and 66th Street. The area had been developed and named Lincoln Square less than a decade earlier, and Wiggins uses the veils of snow to soften the raw edges of his new urban subject. While the artist’s later views of city snow scenes, such as those in FGM’s collection, exhibit a denser application of chalky, opaque white, here Wiggins works in thinner veils of color to construct a nuanced sense of atmosphere tinged with urban grime. The artist brings an Impressionist’s appreciation for shifting weather and light conditions to a city scene, combining it with the quick brushwork evident in the tiny figures and the touches of bright color, such as orange line on a sign at the upper right. The result is a composition that owes as much to the Ashcan School as to the Lyme Art Colony, where Wiggins was already a member. Our priority list has long identified a superlative painting by Wiggins as a collecting target. In nearly a decade of looking together, Jeff and I do not recall encountering another example as fine as this one. The fact that the painting has been in the same family since its acquisition from the artist enhances its value, as does its large size, exhibition history, and the accolades received near the time of its making. Our collection already contains three New York views by Wiggins, but all are later (1919, 1927, ca. 1950) and are examples of his characteristic mature style, in contrast to the livelier technique and thinner application of paint in Lincoln Square, Winter. This painting would reveal to our audience the best of what Wiggins could accomplish, and at the same time, would also stand as an example of the way Lyme Art Colony painters divided their time between the city and the country.