Appreciation of the beauty of nature as undisturbed by man seems inherent in our race, but man in his material progress is constantly defacing nature, constantly destroying, constantly substituting forms and arrangements dictated by utility, not by beauty, and shocking to our finer instincts. Then imagination steps in and gradually invests these new forms with new meanings derived from history, logic, romance, symbolism and pure poetic fancy. Some are condemned and discarded as unnecessary or useless, while others at first glance equally ugly acquire a significance and a soul. Of him who would interpret such a theme as New York our first demand must therefore be prophetic vision. To the artist who seeks to penetrate the outer surfaces of his subject and to suggest and interpret an activity, a creative power, a vastness of scale and a variety of functions beyond human power to portray, charcoal is a most, perhaps the most, inspiring medium. It is surely the medium that most readily lends itself to the simultaneous expression of form, mass, line and tone. Hopkinson Smith once said that Venice is nothing but air and water. There all else has been so softened and moulded and enveloped as to become part and parcel of sea and cloud. The portrayal of this is preëminently a painter’s job. But New York, in addition to being a lot of other things, is a Venice in the making, and all the ugly paraphernalia by means of which this making is slowly going forward, all the unlovely processes, physical and chemical, structural and commercial, must be recognized and expressed and by the light of poetic vision be made a part of its beauty and romance. A painter might perhaps strive to envelope and obscure whatever seemed objectionable in a glory of color. An architect might lay undue stress upon the many examples of distinction in the work of his craft, which are often all but details in a vast scheme. The pictorial expression of New York requires a blending of the view points of the painter and the architect in which both contribute to an image of something not yet realized, perhaps never to be fully realized, and help in dramatizing the struggle towards that thing. Peter Marcus is a painter not an architect, but he is also a designer experienced in the goldsmith’s craft and there is evident in these charcoal studies a pleasure in the delineation of the tracery of bridge cables and trusses, derricks, scaffolding and electric signs, that in contrast with his broad and greatly simplified expressions of architectural form and detail, adds vastly to the eloquence of his work. Furthermore, he is a native of New York as his parents were before him, and the slow development by which New York has climbed upward has been part and parcel of his life. These are the days of a premature development or forcing of the artistic personality, usually expressed at some sacrifice of the prevailing characters and sentiment of his subject.