Coney Island

Seen from an elevated viewpoint, the broad beach at Coney Island, New York, is a sea of humanity in Harry Roseland's panoramic painting. The resort's famous boardwalk and attractions are far in the left distance, while the water itself is just glimpsed on the far right. They are separated by a suffocatingly dense crowd of faceless pleasure-seekers clad in swimming gear and equipped with towels, uniform rented folding chairs, and other paraphernalia, through which the sand underfoot barely shows. The crowd includes people of every age and size, but gender distinctions are blurred by the uniformity of the period's bathing attire, typically black and covering the upper body for men as well as women. The claustrophobic, anonymous congestion of Coney Island's beach as presented by Roseland stands in sharp contrast to the intimate focus on individual experience in Edward Henry Potthast's joyful paintings of children at the seaside in such examples as Ring around the Rosy (TF1992.58).

Born in Brooklyn, Roseland spent his entire life there painting portraits and works of genre (scenes of everyday life). But it was not until late in his career, around 1930, that he began to portray Coney Island, easily reached from his Fulton Street residence by subway beginning in 1920. By then, the lively, democratic culture of urban beach-going had become an important theme among the New York social realist painters dubbed the Ashcan School by a derisive critic. These artists, and others who carried on their spirit of social scrutiny, reveled in the hedonistic if somewhat abandoned behaviors of ordinary city folk on holiday. Having spent much of his career documenting everyday life by focusing closely on individual character types, in his Coney Island paintings Roseland adopted a bird's-eye perspective that reduces the typical beach-goer to a faceless, endlessly replicated type. This work hovers between affectionate humor and grim satire in its presentation of Coney Island as a place that simultaneously promises and thwarts personal freedom and pleasure.

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