It is a gorgeous sunny day here in Greenpoint. Artists help make Brooklyn cool, but it is tough to pay the soaring rents here and devote yourself to art. One of my good friends, talented artist Monte Antrim, whose work graced the cover of my book Greenpoint’s Forgotten Past, is an example. Monte was driven out of the area by the rent structure, a huge loss to our community. I was thinking about two other artists who once lived here. They were amongst the greatest American painters of the nineteenth century George Inness and Ralph Blakelock.
Inness and Blakelock were friends who once lived locally, daily taking the ferry to their Manhattan studios. They both started painting in the Hudson River School of Landscape painting, but their lives and careers went in very different directions. Inness was living in a boarding house on India Street in the 1870’s before his career took off. In terms of composition, precision of drawing, and the emotive use of color, his paintings rank him among the best and most successful landscape painters ever in America and he was soon discovered. Inness was the subject of a major retrospective in 1884, which brought him national recognition. Then, he earned international fame when he received a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition. His works brought him celebrity and fetched high prices. If you want to see his work, check out the Montclair Museum, which has a whole gallery devoted to his work.
His friend Blakelock’s life and career went in the opposite direction. Blakelock married Cora Bailey from Milton Street and the couple had ten children. Blakelock’s style was so ahead of its time that it was neither understood nor a commercial success. The pressure of trying to sell his art to feed his large family pushed him over the edge and he was committed to a mental institution. Years later, after he was committed, people recognized his genius and starting paying high prices for his work, but a swindler conned his wife into giving her control of his paintings, which the grifter sold, pocketing all the money and robbing the family blind. Today Blakelock’s works hang in major museums and he is recognized as one of the greatest American painters of the 19th century.