| Exhibition Dates: |
November 15, 2016–June 25, 2017 |
| Exhibition Location: |
The Met Fifth Avenue, Mezzanine,
The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art,
Gallery 773
|
Twenty-seven rarely exhibited oil paintings by William P. Chappel (ca. 1801–1878), a tinsmith and amateur painter, will be featured in
City of Memory: William Chappel’s Views of Early 19th-Century New York, opening November 15 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The series represents nearly all of Chappel’s known oeuvre and is significant for its romantic but meticulous depictions of street life in the city’s working-class districts—now the neighborhoods known as Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and Little Italy. The scenes offer a glimpse of a rarely recorded subject: the lives of ordinary New Yorkers as they worked, prayed, and played more than two centuries ago.
Although they were likely painted near the end of Chappel’s life, in the 1860s or 1870s, the scenes depict the city of his childhood, from about 1806 to 1813. His careful renderings of specific buildings and streets and the peddlers and laborers who inhabited them may have been painted from memory or from previously made sketches. Chappel’s streetscapes represent the work of an artist reflecting on his hometown as it was decades earlier, in the years of the Early Republic, just as New York’s population began to expand dramatically and the city set about remaking itself into the economic capital of the United States.
The exhibition will be featured on The Met
website, as well as
Facebook,
Instagram, and
Twitter.
The exhibition was organized by The Met’s Amy Bogansky, Research Associate, The American Wing.
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Updated March 13, 2017
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