
Brooklyn brownstones and townhouses can be spotted throughout CBH's paintings, prints, and works on paper. From introspective to romantic depictions, Brooklyn's iconic residential architecture has been used by both amateur and professional artists to communicate more than just a sense of place. This Brooklynology post is an opportunity to not only highlight five Brooklyn artists that were inspired by their surroundings, but to also consider how these artists meditated on the meaning of “home” in their work.
Nocturne by Simon Dinnerstein

Simon Dinnerstein’s large-scale drawing Nocturne is one of the newer additions to the Center for Brooklyn History’s collections. The work, which was also once exhibited with the title Nocturne for a Polish Worker, depicts a newly arrived Polish immigrant to Brooklyn. The subject sits in front of a window which looks out on a row of brownstones. The band of townhouses which grounds us in Brooklyn’s built environment is mirrored by the upper band of vignettes representing the inner life of the subject. These vignettes include a church bell tower, a tree-lined street, and Polish heraldry.
When describing his work in the April 1986 issue of American Artist, Dinnerstein wrote, “The earliest of these drawings is Nocturne for a Polish Worker (1982) and here again the individual is depicted in his personal world. The man I was working with and what I wanted to communicate became so complex that somehow the broken-space, or collaged, reality seemed natural, especially as a way of dealing with the subject’s memory and dreams. In considering this drawing, I wondered about the ‘baggage’ we take with us – in terms of association with the past, loyalties to some location or dream, irrational pushes and pulls, and secret ambiguous longings.”
Dinnerstein was born in Brooklyn in 1943. He received his BA at The City College of New York and also studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1964 to 1967. His most famous work, The Fulbright Triptych (1971–74), was started in Germany during a Fulbright fellowship to study printmaking. The Fulbright Triptych, like Nocturne, includes a window looking outward to highlight the tension between a person’s “interiority” and “externality”—or the life-long quest for identity. In Nocturne, the stolid Brooklyn brownstones are key to depicting the complex feelings of being far from one’s country of birth.
Watercolors of Dorothy Layng McEntee

These two watercolors by Dorothy Layng McEntee were created as part of a series of over 200 New York City views the artist created from 1931 to 1980. Many of these views were painted from McEntee’s Brooklyn Heights home and depict a rapidly evolving Brooklyn waterfront and Lower Manhattan skyline. Though the 52 examples of McEntee’s work at the Center for Brooklyn History are certainly valuable as a document of 20th-century New York City, McEntee herself once wrote that the watercolors’ real purpose was “to capture the visual excitement she felt in the city scene.”
McEntee was born in Brooklyn in 1902. Though her ambition was to be a professional painter, by the age of 20 she was responsible for supporting her family and took a job as a high school art teacher. For 38 years she would teach at Brooklyn high schools, working with over 2,000 students before retiring in 1961. She continued to paint after retirement, illustrating seven children’s books written by her sister Frances Martin.
In 1980, McEntee exhibited her New York watercolor series at the Seventieth Art Gallery. The 78-year-old McEntee described the style of the series as “romantic realism”, which is well represented in the watercolor of a sunny Brooklyn brownstone window flanked by palm fronds. The title Venice in Brooklyn romanticizes what McEntee must have carefully observed in her everyday life.
Streets of Mortimer Borne

Mortimer Borne’s The Stoop, State Street, Brooklyn Heights 1949, shows the steep entry staircase typical of brownstones. The stoop (both a word and concept derived from New York’s early Dutch colonists), is depicted as a place to meet and socialize. Neighbors gather on the steps and speak to one another through open windows. Children are dotted across the scene, with one child climbing the small tree on the left.
Borne was born in Rypin, Poland and immigrated to the United States in 1916 as a teenager. His artistic career began in the 1920s; he studied at the National Academy of Design and the Beaux-Arts School of Design. Borne was based in Brooklyn Heights during the 1940s, living variously on State Street and Joralemon Street during this time. He exhibited widely and developed several important printmaking techniques including “color drypoint.”

Borne also created sculptures and oil paintings. Like many urban artists of the period, he was influenced by the style of the Ash Can School, a group of artists who interpreted city life in all its tough, gritty reality. American artists were looking for subjects close to home in the early 1900s, and for Borne Brooklyn was that inspirational home.
Sketches of Henry Sanford Northrop

Not all artworks in the CBH collections are by professional artists. In the 18th and 19th century, a member of Brooklyn’s educated elite regardless of gender was usually taught to draw. These amateur artists would often sketch cultural sites in Brooklyn, portraits of their family and friends, as well as everyday street scenes and figures. When annotated by their creators, the historical value of these drawings as documents of Brooklyn life increases exponentially.
Henry Sanford Northrop was one of these amateur draftsmen who would note when and where he took up his sketchpad. Born in Elyria, Ohio, in 1857, Northrop founded a stamped metal ceiling and roofing company in Pittsburg in 1879. By 1889, a branch was established in New York City around which time Northrop and his family moved to Brooklyn.
Most of the works by Northrop at CBH are colorful watercolors of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Prospect Park; however, a few are simple sketches of Brooklyn townhouses like From Rear of St. John’s Place. The pen drawing shows the various configurations of rear extensions that can be found behind a rowhouse.

Northrop also drew a few interiors of 913 President Street—an extant brownstone in Park Slope. Northrop documents details like the twisting newel post at the end of the staircase and the partially exposed paneled pocket doors.
Portrait of Joralemon Street by Miklos Suba

Miklos Suba was born in Szatmar, Hungary in 1880. He studied architecture at the Royal Hungarian Technical University of Budapest and later painting at the Vienna Academy, before returning to Budapest to work as an architect. Suba immigrated to the United States in 1924, settling in Brooklyn Heights. For the remainder of his career, Suba would be inspired by many aspects of Brooklyn’s varied urban landscape, from the industrial waterfront to neighborhood barbershops.
Portrait of Joralemon Street, completed in 1930, depicts a row of brick townhouses from street level. Two buildings are shown in their entire width while portions of the two adjoining buildings are cut off by the edge of the canvas. The painting, which flattens the familiar Brooklyn Heights townhouse facades, is an example of Suba’s interest in the Precisionist style, a modernist art movement characterized by sharply delineated, simplified images that reduce subjects to essential geometric shapes. Suba’s background as an architect may have drawn him to Precisionism, which reached peak popularity in the 1920s and early 1930s.

This 1943 portrait of Suba, taken by Associated Press photographer Mary Morris, shows the artist with two of his paintings: Portrait of Joralemon Street and God Bless Them, 1942 (now at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston). Joralemon Street was a fitting choice to include, since it is one of Suba's earliest publicly exhibited works. Read more about the Miklos Suba’s depictions of Brooklyn can found in the 2022 Brooklynology post “The World of Miklos Suba.”
Further Reading:
Dinnerstein, Simon, (Artist). The art of Simon Dinnerstein, (Fayetteville : University of Arkansas Press, 1990.) 760.092 D. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
Osman, Suleiman. The invention of brownstone Brooklyn : gentrification and the search for authenticity in postwar New York, (New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2011]) 307.34 O. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
Suba, Miklos, (Artist). Miklos Suba : line by line: a portfolio of Brooklyn drawings, (New York, N.Y.: James Graham & Sons, 2001) 741.074 S. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
This blog post reflects the opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Brooklyn Public Library.
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