George Bellows - North River (1908)

"... While the pastoral hills had been landscaped, the railroad still ran through (the train tunnel would be built by relief workers during the Depression). Civic groups decried the intrusion of industry and rail travel on nature, but Bellows manages a harmony reminiscent of modern artists, and even photographers. John Pfahl’s late-nineteen-eighties series of smoke from Bethlehem Steel’s smokestacks raises the same question that Bellows does: What is a cloud? [George] Bellows’s 'North River,' painted in 1908, looks down past the snow-covered bench on the hills of Riverside Park, past working piers and ships exhaling steam as they work along the white-watered, steel-blue river. ..."
New Yorker: "Go See Bellows" By Robert Sullivan
Telegraph - An American Experiment, at National Gallery, Seven magazine review
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