View, Looking North, Near Museum is the frontispiece of a privately published 1869 volume entitled A Description of the New York Central Park, by one Clarence Cook, and published by F. J. Huntington of 459 Broome Street.
The Museum is not the Metropolitan Museum of Art; that wouldn’t come about for another decade or so. No, this museum is the ecclesiastical-looking structure at right-center, the old chapel from the Mount St. Vincent’s academy and convent. A variety of old school buildings, now repurposed as a wayside inn, cluster to the left of the former chapel.
Nowadays (2011) this is the Central Park Conservancy’s composting area, and the buildings are long gone, apart from some odd corners of the stone foundations.
Off on the left, you can make out the Harlem River and the High Bridge, some four miles to the north.
But what’s this broad thoroughfare curving around below and to the right of the Mount? A drive full of Sunday morning joyriders, while the old chapel and schoolbuildings loom above them like a clifftop Mediterranean castle? It certainly isn’t Fifth Avenue—that doesn’t curve and it’s out of the frame. No, this magnificent road is pure artist’s fancy. It doesn’t appear on the accompanying map (right), which shows the same narrow footpaths that are there today.
This fanciful etching is the most impressive illustration in the book. It probably was chosen as frontispiece because the author had no text for it. It would have to be something like:Â And behold the Park’s carriage drive, which does not exist at present, except in the mind of our spendid illustrator…
The illustrator’s name was Albert Fitch Bellows, one of the “Hudson River School” painters. His only credit in this book comes in the introduction:
One of our most popular artists, Mr. A. F. Bellows, has spent many months in making the drawings, which add so much to the value of the work…