In Robert Frost’s 1916 poem “The Road Not Taken”, he wrote:
“Two roads diverged in a yellow
wood,
And sorry I could not travel both”.
A dilemma that applies in cities as much as in forests, and
metaphorically in life in general. The eternal “what ifs?”, the junctions and forking paths of decisions and fate. However, though one
may not be able to journey along both routes, at least for the time being,
there are occasions when it is possible to view both, taking a slightly
boz-eyed and divergent perspective to the scene. One of the most famous artistic renditions
of this situation is surely “Paris Street: Rainy Day” painted in 1877 by the French
Impressionist, Gustave Caillebotte, depicting a complex street intersection in
the Quartier de l’Europe in the 8th arrondissement, and recently star of the show at a
disappointingly meagre exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, whence
the photo below:
Curiously, there’s
a very similar work called “Rainy Day Boston”, painted in 1885 by the
American artist Childe Hassam. Quite apart from both portraying a wet day in a
city, these paintings share a surprisingly overall similarity in terms of
structure and perspective, showing divergent streets with sharply angled
buildings between them, in effect, offering to the eyes two focal points.
Hassam was aware of Caillebotte’s work in general terms, although I don’t know
if he had seen this particular painting, from eight years earlier, and there is
no suggestion of plagiarism.
And then there’s my own, done with full awareness of both of
the above, but based on a photograph I took five years ago in the Place de
Dublin, just a short distance up the rue de St Petersbourg from the Place de
l’Europe:
Such works
may sensitise us to one not uncommon theme of urban infrastructure and groundplan. Once
we have seen these paintings, such arrangements are rendered more
easily noticeable, and we become more aware of them. They are to be found at
Times Square, for instance, at the Flatiron Building, and at other
intersections where Broadway crosses north-south avenues in Manhattan, and they
abound in Haussmannised Paris and, especially, in other rigidly planned cities
and city districts. Anywhere that an orthogonal grid of streets admits an
angled intruder you’ll find them: in Barcelona, Rome and Washington, DC, for
instance, and even in Pimlico, SW1.
