Paterson: The Aerialist, August 5, 1879

Robert Birmelin's painting depicts an event that occurred near the end of the nineteenth-century.  It was a period of prosperity for Paterson's mills and factories that was made possible by the water power of the Great Falls and the labor of recently arrived immigrants.  At that time, Sunday crowds frequently gathered at the Falls to watch aerialists cross over the span of the gorge.  Birmelin's work illustrates an example of such a daring feat.  The painting was inspired by a blurred and faded photograph from 1879 that depicts Harry Leslie who walked across the gorge on a tightrope.

 

The high-key color of the painting indicates a fine summer day.  Groups of eager onlookers gaze upward as the rope walker steps off from what would be the viewer's location on Mount Morris towards the cliffs adjacent to the Falls.  The artist has employed a wide angle of vision to show us not only the Falls but the massed factories downstream on the right.  Thus the image suggests the complex relation between the natural landscape and the man-made, with its references to water power and man-power, and its indication of the Falls' and Paterson's historic centrality in the daily life of so many men and women.