The Bridge, Sunday 1952

"The Bridge, Sunday," drawn by Prentiss Taylor in 1956, is a lithograph of the Brooklyn bridge. The way Taylor has painstakingly stippled this image, building tone upon tone with tiny, precise marks, gives the scene a muted, almost dreamlike quality. It makes me wonder what he was thinking as he made the image? Maybe he was contemplating the massive scale of the bridge or the way the light filtered through the buildings on a quiet Sunday morning. There is an amazing stillness in the image, a feeling that time has paused for just a moment. It makes me want to pick out one brick in that road and let it stand for the whole. Each of those marks contains so much information—each dot, line, and smudge is so full of feeling. We can look to other lithographers like Stow Wengenroth, who were similarly trying to communicate a feeling, intention, or meaning. It reminds us how artists are always speaking to each other, even across time.