{"id":236384,"date":"2026-05-19T05:50:03","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T05:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/236384\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T05:50:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T05:50:03","slug":"paintings-of-the-brooklyn-bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/236384\/","title":{"rendered":"Paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Brooklyn Bridge is celebrating its 143rd birthday on May 24, the day Gilded Age New Yorkers could finally walk across this wondrous span and celebrate the uniting of Brooklyn and Manhattan.<\/p>\n

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Over close to a century and a half, the Brooklyn Bridge has taken the honor of the city\u2019s most painted and photographed structure. I\u2019d bet it\u2019s also one of the most popular subjects for artists all over the world.<\/p>\n

The Brooklyn Bridge over peaceful waters, the bridge and its smoky harbors, the turbulent river and the sturdy bridge lighting the way, the Ashcan school bridge, the Abstract bridge\u2014every artist sees and creates something different when they portray this steel, granite, and limestone beauty.<\/p>\n

The various takes on the bridge really hit me when I came across the two paintings in this post. Though both were completed in the early 20th century with the Brooklyn Bridge as a focal point, they conjure very different emotions and insight.<\/p>\n

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The first is by Jonas Lie<\/a>, entitled \u201cPath of Gold\u201d and completed in 1914. Lie, a Norway-born artist, gives us an Impressionist bridge as a gateway to good fortune, with tugs and other crafts all heading in the same direction without confusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cLie painted this work from slightly above the boats heading upriver\u2014a perspective that seems to include the viewer along the path to prosperity,\u201d states the High Museum of Art in Atlanta<\/a>, which has the painting in its collection.<\/p>\n

A very different painting from 1931 is \u201cThe Bridge Pier\u201d by Robert Ryland. Grainy and textured, Ryland\u2019s Brooklyn Bridge is less a gateway to prosperity than a steel barrier to it.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018The Bridge Pier,\u2019 in which a man in a white shirt seems to slump beneath the weight of the city,\u201d wrote the New York Times<\/a> in 2013, when both paintings were featured in an exhibition at the Hudson River Museum called \u201cIndustrial Sublime: Modernism and the Transformation of New York\u2019s Rivers, 1900-1940.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lie\u2019s Brooklyn Bridge celebrates its magnificence, showing the entire span, the industrious Brooklyn harbor, and the steel skyscrapers of business on the Manhattan side.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Ryland\u2019s Brooklyn Bridge disappears into the chaos and melancholy of the modern world, with a forgotten man wondering if there\u2019s a place for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cPainted during the Great Depression, it looks up at the dark, hulking forms of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan\u2019s Municipal Building and sees oppression,\u201d the Times wrote. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Brooklyn Bridge is celebrating its 143rd birthday on May 24, the day Gilded Age New Yorkers could…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-236384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}