Gifford Beal

Born in New York City and the son of landscape painter William Reynolds Beal, Gifford Beal began studying at William Merritt Chase's Shinnecock School of Art at the age of thirteen, when he accompanied his older brother Reynolds to summer classes. At his father's insistence he attended Princeton University from 1896-1900, but still commuted to New York on weekends to continue his lessons with Chase. On graduating from college, he took classes at the Art Students League, studying with Impressionist landscape painter Henry Ward Ranger and Boston academic painter Frank Vincent DuMond. In 1901 he began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design. He regularly contributed to annual exhibitions at the National Academy, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago, winning numerous awards. In 1907 he was given his first two-man show with his brother at New York's Clausen Galleries. He exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, and from 1914 to 1929 acted as president of the Art Students League.

Beal's style was clearly influenced by his studies with Chase and by the work of Childe Hassam, who was a longtime friend of the Beal family. Both painters were famous for their picturesque Impressionist views of New York City's parks, avenues, and other upper class leisure entertainments and of the landscape and coastline of Connecticut and Long Island. Likewise, Beal became known for his colorful views of New York's Central Park, zoos and circuses, cafés and stages, and the landscape and people of coastal Massachusetts. While John Sloan, Robert Henri, George Bellows, and other realists pictured the more gritty aspects of city life--including the city's working class, its growing immigrant population, and its popular entertainments, Gifford and Reynolds Beal epitomized the new Realism in their colorful Impressionist paintings of the city's commercial and industrial growth. Reynolds concentrated on rivers and harbors, and Gifford focused on views of freight yards, rooftops, streets, and city architecture.

In the 1910s Beal produced a number of views of New York City, which emphasized its industrial and technological growth--elevated trains, skyscrapers, docks, bridges, and factories are often from a high vantage point that allowed for a bird's eye view of the city. First built in 1868, New York's elevated lines provided the city's first mass transit services, and for decades were the envy of a number of growing cities across the country.