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| Sunset, West Twenty-third Street,1906 |
An evocative rooftop scene by painter John Sloan from 1906. I love the depiction of the ordinary from long ago. Only in the mundane details do we really get a sense of a particular time. The light and weather weren't so different. The people were the same--only the styles were different. Clothes and hair. Their height, since they were generally shorter back then owing to a lack of access to nutritious foods. The sunset above looks familiar, but the woman in the foreground, the laundry on the line, and the traffic lights below all present an alien profile. The smudges Sloan brushed in the sky speak to the omnipresent level of pollution back during the raging infancy of the industrial age.
I can imagine the smells. That same pollution. An abundance of manure due to the prevalence of horses. Automobiles were not yet dominant. And the saltier odors from humans too. Hygiene wasn't as rigorously observed as it is now. If I could travel to that time and place in the picture, my first thought would be incredulity at my presence where it shouldn't be. My second thought would be, I'm going to die. By today's standards, medical technology was grievously primitive. Tuberculosis was a relentless killer. Break the skin and infection was soon to follow. Life expectancy for a male in that year was a mere 47 years, just a few years more for a woman. The very air surrounding you was a lethal, slavering beast.
