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Accession #	40.339
Artist	George Benjamin Luks
Title	Street Scene (Hester Street)
Date	1905
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	25 13/16 x 35 7/8 in. (65.5 x 91.1 cm) frame: 32 1/2 x 43 x 3 in. (82.6 x 109.2 x 7.6 cm)
Signed	Signed lower right: "George Luks"
Credit Line	Dick S. Ramsay Fund
Location	American Identities: Colony to Nation / Inventing American Landscape

Curatorial Remarks: In this scene capturing a crowded pushcart market on Hester Street on New York’s Lower East Side, George Benjamin Luks positions the viewer directly at street level and in close proximity to the array of men, women, and children who throng the foreground. Although the painting has been interpreted as a sympathetic vignette of Jewish life, it shows a closer kinship to Luks’s colleague Robert Henri’s method of representing people as racial or ethnic “types” rather than as specific individuals (see nearby work). Here, the figures are presented in profile, with particular attention to skin color and physical features, while the subject matter relates to a series of caricatures of Jewish peddlers—which engage with anti-Semitic stereotypes—that Luks created for Truth magazine in the 1890s.