The Winter Art Show

During the year that has passed since the editors assembled the last “Winter Art Show,” they have once again come across scores of appealing paintings that for one reason or another didn’t make it into the magazine. The scope of the material continues to surprise and delight us. So, too, do some of the sources. We met the gravely appealing child on the opposite page, for instance, on our senior editor Frederick Alien’s wedding day; the boy is his great-great-uncle, and the painting was hanging on the wall of his parents’ apartment. As always, the pictures on the pages that follow remind us of what eloquent historical documents paintings can be, whether they are detailing the fixtures of daily life 130 years ago, as Reissner’s sharp-edged and exhilarating winter landscape does, or conveying the feel of another time more subtly. The very way the light falls against the wall of the tall Central Park West living room at John Koch’s cocktail party tells us something of the level of civilized life in Manhattan thirty years ago.