The Rotunda (New York City)

Frontispiece to Views of the Public Buildings in the City of New York 1827.
1828 image of The Rotunda

The Rotunda was an art gallery that stood in City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, New York City, from 1818 to 1870.

The Rotunda was built by American artist John Vanderlyn. According to historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Vanderlyn was motivated by the refusal of the city's cultural elite to include paintings such as his nude Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos in public exhibitions on the grounds that it was an affront to public decency.[1] Backed by John Jacob Astor and other wealthy New Yorkers, he built The Rotunda. Widely regarded as the city's first art museum,[2][3][4] it operated on a commercial footing.[1]

The building was designed on the model of The Pantheon in Rome. It was fifty-six feet in diameter, crowned with a thirty-foot dome.[1]

Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles (1818-19), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

The Rotunda opened in 1818 to display Vanderlyn's Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles,[1] a cyclorama now on display in a purpose-built, circular room in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City.[5] In the painting, to the right of the Latona Fountain, Vanderlyn painted himself pointing towards Czar Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William III of Prussia.[5]

Today, a bronze plaque inside the park marks the site of the Rotunda.[3]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Oxford University Press. 1998. p. 468. |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  2. ↑ "Parks for the New Metropolis (1811–1870)". nycgovparks.org. New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Retrieved 29 November 2017.
  3. 1 2 "Civil Engineers Plaque". nycgovparks.org. New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Retrieved 29 November 2017.
  4. ↑ Hall, Edward Hagaman; "A Brief History of City Hall Park, New York," Fifteenth Annual Report of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (Albany, 1910). pp. 397-8
  5. 1 2 "Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles". metmuseum.org. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 29 November 2017.

Further reading

  • Avery, Kevin J., & Fodera, Peter L. (1988). John Vanderlyn's panoramic view of the palace and gardens of Versailles. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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