Contemplative in mood and masterful in technique, this print of From the Back Window--291--Snow Covered Tree, Back-Yard is rendered in the nuanced platinum process, of which Alfred Stieglitz was a virtuoso. Stieglitz’s careful handling of highlights and shadows, and all tones in between, ensures that a wealth of detail is present throughout the image, resulting in a photographic tour-de-force. This print encapsulates both the atmospheric physicality of its subject and Stieglitz’s fascination with the familiar cityscape transformed by newly fallen snow. Through Stieglitz’s vision and technical mastery, this quotidian scene becomes a transcendent artistic experience, one that could only be achieved through the medium of photography.

This photograph is one of several studies that Stieglitz executed from the rear window of his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan between 1915 and 1917. By that time, he had already created a remarkable body of images of the city, including such icons as The Terminal (1892), Winter—Fifth Avenue (1892), and The City of Ambition (1910), among many others. Although those earlier works were executed in the Pictorial mode and emphasized atmosphere over detail, they conveyed the muscularity of a city growing at an astonishing rate. Old and New New York (1910) presents Stieglitz’s most obvious account of the city’s expansion.

Alfred Stieglitz, Old and New New York (1910),
photogravure from Camera Work

From the Back Window shows Stieglitz working in a different mode. Instead of the teeming commercial urban environment whose stone and metal edges had been softened by Stieglitz’s Pictorial aesthetic, he presents a rare moment of quiet poetry in the city. To capture the image Stieglitz relied upon his vast reservoir of photographic technique acquired through decades of rigorous camera work in the city, and his education, as a young man, in photographic chemistry. He was ideally equipped to photograph this challenging low-light scene, and to produce a bravura print that presents a highly detailed, yet delicately evocative account of the scene before his camera.

“No other photographer before Stieglitz managed to draw out of the photographic print the same sense of tactility and spirit.”
—Peter C. Bunnell, Curator & Photo HistorianThis image was one of nine photographs from the series From the Back Window—291 shown in the important 1921 An Exhibition of Photography by Alfred Stieglitz at The Anderson Galleries. Stieglitz thought so highly of this image that he gave a print of it to American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, whom he much admired, which is now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

Katherine N. Rhoades, with hand to neck, in the company of Paul Haviland, Abraham Walkowitz, Emmy Stieglitz, Agnes Meyer, Alfred Stieglitz, J. B. Kerfoot, and John Marin, Mt. Kisco, New York, 1912.

The photograph offered here was originally in the collection of artist and poet Katharine N. Rhoades (1885-1965). Rhoades studied painting under Robert Henri, and in the early years of the 20^th century became a frequent visitor to Stieglitz’s 291 gallery. Talented and socially connected, she soon became an indispensable part of the 291 circle of artists. She exhibited in the seminal Armory Show of 1913, and at Gallery 291 in 1915. She contributed to Camera Work and Stieglitz’s avant-garde publication, 291, and posed for his camera on numerous occasions. The print offered here was part of a trove of Stieglitz photographs from Rhoades’s collection that surfaced in 2012. It is one of only a handful of examples of the image, and one of only two in private hands. In Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, Sarah Greenough locates prints at the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
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- Provenance
  Alfred Stieglitz to Katharine N. Rhoades
  By descent to Barbara Rhoades, North Carolina
  Leland Little Auctions, Hillsborough, North Carolina, 17 March 2012, Lot 48
  Private Collection, Texas
  Private Collection, Missouri
- Literature
  Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, Volume One, cat. no. 421
  Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, pl. XVII
  J. Paul Getty Museum, In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz, pl. 15
  National Gallery of Art, Exhibition of Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Washington, D.C., exh. cat., 1958, pl. 3
  Yale University Press, The Art of Photography, 1839-1989, pl. 200
  LIFE, 'Speaking of Pictures . . . These are by one of Photography's Pioneers,' 5 April 1945, p. 7