In the first of these two articles looking at paintings depicting change in New York City between the mid-1880s and 1920, I had just introduced the paintings of skyscrapers by Colin Campbell Cooper.

For those less familiar with New York City at the end of the nineteenth century, this contemporary map might help.

Cooper’s Broadway from the Post Office (Wall Street) (c 1909) is another of his most famous skyscraper cityscapes, showing the Singer Building or Tower, at Liberty Street and Broadway, that had only just been completed, and was still the tallest building in the world. Below in Broadway itself the street is packed with people. The golden light on the walls of the buildings is particularly strong, and clouds of steam enhance its effect. The Singer Building, then the headquarters of the Singer Manufacturing Company, was demolished in 1968, and replaced by 1 Liberty Plaza.

Cooper’s Columbus Circle from 1909 is less about the vertical, and more the interaction of jumbled buildings, light, smoke, and steam. With Gaetano Russo’s landmark statue of Christopher Columbus just to the right of centre, the circle had only been completed in 1905, as part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Central Park, which is off to the right. In the foreground, Cooper shows some of the more intimate sights of this new elevated world, with a woman hanging out her washing amid the chimneys.

New York from Brooklyn (c 1910) shows the busy piers of Brooklyn still operating as the major gateway into the East Coast, and the ultimate collection of skyscrapers, most of which had only recently been completed. The colour contrast between the pale gold faces in sunlight and the almost purple of cast shadow is characteristic of Cooper’s style.

George Bellows trained with Robert Henri in New York, and worked from his own studio in the city for much of his career. As Cooper was busy painting skyscrapers, Bellows concentrated on the lives of working class migrants living in the tenements of Lower East Side.

He showed the deep excavations required for the construction of the city’s skyscrapers.

Bellows’ The Bridge, Blackwell’s Island (1909) shows the Queensboro Bridge linking Manhattan with Queens to the east. Its piers rest on Blackwell’s Island (now known as Roosevelt Island). This view was painted from the Manhattan end in December 1909, shortly after it had been opened, when it was the greatest cantilever bridge in the world.

New York (1911) balances the world of the people of New York, with that of their buildings. It was shown that year in the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York, and annually thereafter for the rest of Bellows’ career, but wasn’t sold until after his death.

Bellows’ famous Cliff Dwellers (1913) shows the largely immigrant population of tenements in Lower East Side. This was the first painting to be purchased by the county of Los Angeles for its new museum of art, in 1916, where it remains today.

In his later paintings, Cooper moved from the solid mass of skyscrapers to greater lightness and greenery. Although one high building is still present in his New York Public Library (c 1915), the street is less densely packed, and the plants and trees brilliant green.

Joseph Stella was Italian by birth, and first migrated to New York City in 1896 to study medicine. He soon changed his mind, though, and studied painting under William Merritt Chase, at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art. On completion of his training, he worked as an illustrator, but became increasingly unhappy, so returned to Italy in 1909. He travelled back to New York City in 1913, to give the US a second try, and stayed in the city until his death there in 1946.

Stella was attracted to the dazzling electric lights of Luna Park (1913) on Coney Island, which had opened a decade earlier. His new style developed when he had been in Paris was startlingly different, and Futurist.

This was followed by Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913), one of the earliest, and still among the greatest, of American Futurist paintings. Although it’s sometimes claimed that it was exhibited at the famous (even notorious) International Exhibition of Modern Art held in New York in early 1913, known now as the Armory Show, Stella didn’t complete it until the autumn of that year, when it went on display in a private gallery in New York.

Stella was nothing if not eclectic. In 1919-20, he painted probably his best-known work, this Cubist geometric analysis of Brooklyn Bridge (1919-20).

As he grew older, Colin Campbell Cooper still apparently craved the occasional skyscraper, and must have painted Hudson River Waterfront, New York City (c 1921) when he was back in his East Coast studio. The highlit and tallest building on the left is the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, and until 1930 the tallest building in the world, at 241.4 metres. But here the clouds are also built up high, and rise to belittle such human structures, as they did in landscape paintings of the Dutch Golden Age.