Thomas Nast’s ‘Central Park in Winter’

Two scenes, showing skating and sleighing in Central Park. The top panel includes drawings of James Gordon Bennett Sr and Horace Greeley
For the January 30, 1864, issue of Harper’s Weekly, Thomas Nast drew a many-paneled illustration of Central Park in winter.  Like many of his works, this one featured a large central drawing, surrounded by smaller vignettes in round and elliptical frames.  The main drawing shows New Yorkers ice-skating on Central Park’s Pond.  (The Park was then only a few years old.)  Below that is a rather wild sleighing scene, in which genteel New Yorkers ride through a desolate terrain, as urchins throw snowballs or rocks at them.

The opening of Central Park coincided with ice-skating’s growing popularity, which took hold in earnest in the 1850s.  The Park was most heavily visited in winter, when its pond became crowded with thousands of skaters, whose activities Nast captures here in wonderful detail.  (Note the woman in the skating chair.)

Perhaps inevitably, Nast’s wonderland contains some politics, too.  Two months earlier, President Lincoln had been reelected as an inconclusive Civil War dragged on, inflicting terrible casualties.  New York, being a commercial center, had always viewed the war with ambivalence.  The conflict was contrary to the city’s interests, disrupting a lucrative trade with the South on which New York’s economy relied.  While many New Yorkers were ardent Unionists and Republicans, the city also had a large Democratic constituency, including a politically active immigrant population, which resented the war, the federal government, and the fuss about slaves.  Many, wishing a return to peace, had lately voted for Lincoln’s challenger, Democrat George McClellan.

Anger over the federal government’s war policies had boiled into violence the previous July.  New York became the scene of bloody draft riots, in which rioters lynched at least 11 blacks and 120 people were killed in street fighting between protesters and the police.  Poor whites were inflamed against a draft bill that Congress had recently passed: while ostensibly requiring all fit men to serve in the Union military, it contained a loophole that wealthier Northerners would use to evade the draft: arranging for a replacement by paying a bounty.

In the foreground of his skating scene, Nast (who ardently supported Lincoln and the war) highlights several figures, including a military man at the far left wearing a kepi—a reminder of high-minded Northerners voluntarily leading the Union effort as officers.  At right are two prominent New York newspaper editors, James Gordon Bennett Sr and Horace Greeley, who have run into trouble on proverbially thin ice.  Greeley is teetering, while Bennett has fallen, both near a hole signifying treachery.  Bennett had been an outspoken critic of Lincoln and proponent of McClellan, whereas Greeley, while fitfully supportive of the war, had recently embarrassed the Lincoln administration by engaging in bogus ‘peace negotiations’ with some Confederate representatives who turned out to be fakes.

Both editors, though overwhelmingly influential, earned Nast’s scorn because they were feckless peace-mongers.  To have ended the Civil War through a settlement at that juncture would have rendered the suffering of the soldiers in vain.

Their presence heightens the allegorical meaning of the left side of the tableau, where three figures guard the safety of the family and society.  Besides the Union officer, who holds a small boy in his arms, Nast’s own editor Fletcher Harper (with mutton-chop whiskers) stands over a young girl protectively, while a third man (unidentified, but probably a prominent editor, too) deferentially greets a woman standing at the edge of the ice.  Nast depicts these figures as both benevolent and patriotic.  Harper gave Nast a venue for his pro-Union and radically egalitarian views.

So what at first glance passes for an innocuous pleasure scene is a comment on specific editors, and a paean to the value of virtuous editors in a conflict-ridden time.

Image from this source.

Ready or Not

Puck Christmas 1899 (Courtesy Library of Congress)
The new American girl glides into a new century on the 1899 cover of Puck magazine.  She holds onto her hat, her skirts flapping and duster billowing out behind her, a measure of her velocity.  She smiles in a frank and carefree way, as Puck pushes her from behind.

Frank Nankiwell‘s marvelous drawing captures the freedom and athleticism that the American girl of this era was enjoying.  Though her clothes look constraining to a modern eye, in relation to fashions that had come before, her garb was practical, masculine, and revealingly form-fitting.

In the Gay 1890s, as horizons for women broadened, their increasing physicality prompted dramatic changes in the clothing they favored.  Women began wearing shirtwaists and belts borrowed from men’s fashions.  Their bell-like skirts hugged their hips and thighs, before flaring out dramatically above the knee.  The length was short enough to reveal ankles and leave feet more free.  So dressed, the American woman moved faster and more freely, increasingly visible on skates, on bicycles, and in automobiles.

Image from this source.

Maidens Speed-Skate, 1809

Women racing on ice skates in 1809.
‘At a women’s skating race in Leeuwarden [the Netherlands] in 1809, the crowd watched sixty-four unmarried women vie for a gold cap-brooch. The winner was Houkje Gerrits Bouma. For greater ease, many had thrown off their cloaks. Baur painted the finalists with bare arms, a jettisoned cloak on the ice. It left little to men’s imagination and caused an outcry; therefore it was the last women’s race for many years.’

 

Image: Nicolaas Baur (Dutch, 1767-1820)
‘Women’s Skating Competition on the Stadsgracht in Leeuwarden, 21 January 1809’
Rijks Museum via Wikimedia Commons

This is the ninth in an occasional series of posts on ice-skating.
Click here to go to the first post.

Speed Skater Hugh Palliser

Hugh Palliser skating toward the camera circa 1904 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The speed skater circa 1905 stood out as an other-worldly figure, his gear and garb outlandish to those around him.  Here is Hugh Palliser, a gifted amateur skater, manifesting the transformation that a trending obsession with speed brought on.  His clothing, his hat, his skates, his stance: all set him off from skaters out only for recreation.

His simple tunic, tight woolen leggings, and practical beanie register how science was changing the centuries-old sport of skating.  Hugely popular as a late-nineteenth-century pastime, skating was developing a more serious side, as passionate competitors like Palliser pondered how to apply the new principles of efficiency to the business of getting across the ice.

The speed skater shunned the bulky street clothes his contemporaries were wearing.  For the sake of speed, he donned a minimalist outfit one step away from wearing nothing.  Equipment manufacturers like Spalding were producing new kinds of skates, with blades engineered with speed in mind.  American skaters had begun looking beyond their nation’s boundaries, racing against Europeans and Canadians, and forming a cosmopolitan fraternity that fostered a flow of innovation.

Champion speed skater Morris Wood

Palliser skated for the Euclid School in Brooklyn, NY, then one of the nation’s top speed-skating teams.  His teammates included national champion Morris Wood, Allen Taylor, and ‘Gus’ Stolz.  All four appeared as poster-boys for their sport in Spalding Athletic Library’s 1904 How To Become a Skater, which introduced a new generation to the gospel of speed.

Images: from this source and this.
This is the eighth in an occasional series of posts on ice-skating.

Sisterhood on ice

A circle of girls and young women on the ice.
As ice-skating became a leading pastime in the 1860s, pictures of ice-skating and ice-skaters proliferated in the popular press, recording its impact on society.  Looking at such pictures, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that skating represented something special in the lives of women, while also violating existing norms.  If skating let women escape a certain social confinement, it rendered them more vulnerable, too.  Ice-skating, though fun and bold, exposed women to certain perils, among them a mixing of classes and sexes that nineteenth-century society was set up to avoid.

This print by Winslow Homer (1836-1910) encapsulates such strains.  Continue reading