Ralph Fasanella

Sunday Afternoon

Oil on Canvas, 1953

Several recurring themes make up this remarkable canvas of life in the city. Fasanella’s preoccupation with sports is illustrated by the painting’s center showing a street baseball game—a standard fixture of tenement life of the period. Then the artist takes us behind the windows of the apartments of the “watchers” and the task of demonstrating their diversity is clearly a labor of love.