They all went down to the water

Glintenkamp put the address in the picture. Two street signs cross the middle of his lithograph and they read FRONT ST and OLD SLIP: the East River side of lower Manhattan, one block in from the water. Three blocks south of that corner is Coenties Slip, and that is where Glenn Coleman stood to draw a steamer at the pier in 1928.

The two men studied under the same teacher, Robert Henri. Their prints are in different museums, in different cities, catalogued a lifetime apart. Put them on the same wall and they are neighbours.

Fifty years of the same city

The earliest sheet here is Henry Farrer's, from 1884. It shows the harbour under sail, a low shed, water going flat at dusk. The Brooklyn Bridge had opened the year before and Farrer left it out.

Twenty years later Joseph Pennell is standing on Broadway with his head back, drawing towers that lean in until the sky is a strip. By the nineteen-thirties Elias Grossman is under the arch at Washington Square in the rain, and the towers are ordinary. Nobody in his picture looks up.

That is the collection. Not a period, and not a style. One city, photographed by nobody, drawn by hand for fifty years while it turned into itself.

What a print costs to make

These are not reproductions of paintings. Every sheet is the object itself, pulled from a plate or a stone by the person who cut it.

Farrer and Horter used etching: a needle through wax, acid into copper, a line thinner than anything a pencil can do. Coleman, Pennell and Glintenkamp drew on limestone with a greasy crayon and printed from the stone. Coleman's sheet is inscribed 9/50 in his own hand. Glintenkamp's is 4/50. Fifty impressions, then the stone is ground flat and the image is gone.

We print the whole sheet, edge and all. The pencil signatures stay. So do the titles the artists wrote themselves below the plate, and, on one of Grossman's, the abbreviation imp., which means he inked and pulled it without help.

How they survived

Grossman's William Street still carries the stamp of the Federal Art Project, the New Deal programme that put artists on a government salary during the Depression. Prints made under it were never sold. They were sent out to libraries and federal offices, and the museum records say so plainly: one came to the Smithsonian as a transfer from the D.C. Public Library, another from the General Services Administration.

The rest arrived the ordinary way. Coleman was bought by Detroit in 1931, three years after he made it and one year before he died. Pennell's three lithographs came as a bequest from Olin Dows. Horter's came from his widow.

All eight are in the public domain. We checked each one against the institution's own rights record rather than the caption on its web page, because the two do not always agree.

The corner is still there

Old Slip and Coenties Slip are streets in the Financial District now. The slips themselves were filled in long ago; the water that gave them their names is two blocks further east than it was. The Mallory Line shed that Coleman drew is gone. Front Street runs where it always ran.

Eight sheets, five hands, fifty years. You can hang two of them side by side and be looking at the same three blocks.