Stoops in Snow

In Martin Lewis's etching Stoops in Snow, several hardy pedestrians, bowed under umbrellas, hats, and upturned coat collars beneath an onslaught of blowing snow, make their way along a sidewalk past a row of typical New York nineteenth-century row houses, each with an identical front stairway. This print captures the artist's relish of the challenge of capturing the transitory atmospheric qualities and tonal nuances of winter weather and daylight effects. Lewis used sandpaper to roughen the plate surface and thus achieve a subtle grainy texture that conveys falling snowflakes and the trampled snowy carpet covering most of the lower half of the image. Streaks of white capture the optical experience of blowing snowflakes, and strong contrasts of dark and light suggest the peculiar flattening effect of a blinding snowstorm, in which even such quotidian details of urban life as garbage cans, at the lower left, are mysteriously transformed.

Stoops in Snow demonstrates the artistic influences Lewis absorbed during his extended stay in Japan over eight years earlier. Like the Japanese masters of woodblock printmaking he admired, he presents his subject from a seemingly casual, cropped vantage point, relegating people and architecture to the sidelines flanking an "empty" central expanse here animated by strokes and nuances of white tones. The composition thus imbues the mundane scene with compelling visual interest. New York City was a favorite subject for many artists, but as this print and his Glow of the City (TF 1995.42) demonstrate, Lewis favored extreme weather conditions or nighttime darkness to underscore the drama and poetry lurking beneath the prosaic surface of the urban scene. Perhaps for this reason he eliminated from Stoops in Snow the form of a distant storage tank included in a preliminary sketch for this print, and he abandoned his working title's reference to the scene's specific locale: Manhattan's West 40s, a middle-class residential quarter developed in the late nineteenth century.

Ville et campagne: les artistes américains, 1870–1920 (The City and the Country: American Perspectives, 1870–1920), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venues: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–July 15, 1999; Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, December 10, 1999–May 7, 2000 (in modified form). [exh. cat.]

McCarron, Paul. Martin Lewis: The Graphic Work. (exh. cat., Kennedy Galleries). New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1973. No. 95.

Jacobowitz, Ellen S. and George H. Marcus. American Graphics 1869–1949: Selected from the Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982. No. 85, p. 89.

Creation & Craft: Three Centuries of American Prints (exh. cat., Hirschl & Adler Galleries). New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 1990. No. 90, p. 87.

McCarron, Paul. The Prints of Martin Lewis: A Catalogue Raisonné. Bronxville, New York: M. Hausberg, 1995. No. 89, pp. 162–63.

"Martin Lewis's World: Cityscapes on Paper." American Art Review 10:5 (September–October 1998): 248–49. Ill. p. 248.