Richard Estes American, b. 1932

Richard Estes's monumental painting Lower Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry (World Trade Center) exemplifies the artist's deft ability to transform everyday subjects into captivating visual narratives, encouraging viewers to reexamine the familiar world with renewed wonder. Estes established his career in the 1960s when he embarked on painting hard-edged portrayals of the New York Cityscape—a tradition he continues today. In the present painting, Estes meticulously captured details that heighten the sensory experience of the artwork. This is evident in the rendering of chipped paint and sea spray visible on the deck of the ferry at the center of the composition. Additionally, the buildings gracing the upper left quadrant of the canvas encapsulate Estes's hallmark technique of fusing multiple views of building façades, reflective surfaces, and windows that introduce additional complexity. Notably, the partially constructed curved glass façade of 17 State Street, ensconced in the center of the skyline, serves as a temporal anchor, as the building was under construction from 1986 to 1988.

Estes's artistic practice focuses on documenting the world around him in photographs, which he then translates into paintings. Revered as the foremost exponent of photorealism, Estes can more accurately be described as a photo-derived painter instrumental in pioneering the use of photography not as a final destination but as a wellspring of data for his artistic process. Estes explained, "I think of the photograph as a sketch to be used, not a goal to be reached." [1] A tenant of Estes's unique artistic approach is his manipulation of perspective and unusual cropping with oblique angles, suggesting the photographer's lens. In 1976, Estes commenced his exploration into painting of views of water. In Estes's urban landscapes, water is often juxtaposed with a smaller scale, distant city, and side views of boats or docks. This artistic device curbs the encroachment of water's expressive and abstract traits from permeating his hyper-realist paintings. The perspective of the present painting, Lower Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry (WTC), showcases both an interior and exterior view, a compositional approach he describes as his "Rigoletto paintings." This term references an act from Giuseppe Verdi's famed 19th-century opera "Rigoletto," where scenes unfold simultaneously inside and outside. Indeed, Estes remains a lifelong fan of the opera.

Estes combines the urban cityscape with his unique brand of realism, positioning him as a counterpart to Edward Hopper as the most famous painter of vacant New York scenes, but without Hopper's alienating mood. Esteemed art historian John Wilmerding writes, "He and Hopper will understandably make an ongoing comparison as the two great painters of New York. For all the admiration Estes shows toward his predecessor in his painting, there are revealing differences. Even in its moments of alienation, Hopper's New York is more social and psychological, Estes' more metaphysical. And to be more provocative: Hopper may have left us with better known and memorable single works, repeatedly exhibited and reproduced in the literature, but Estes is the better painter in the sheer practice of his craft." [2]

[1] Richard Estes, as quoted in Patterson Sims, Richard Estes' Realism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 2