Skip to main content

In the Steerage (work of art)

Artwork Info

Created
1900
Artist
George Luks
Nationality
American
Birth/Death
1866-1933
Dimensions
30 5/8 x 19 1/4 in.
(77.8 x 48.9 cm)
Medium
Painting

Credit

Purchased with funds from the Elizabeth Gibson Taylor and Walter Frank Taylor Fund and the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)

Culture
American

About

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a number of young American painters rejected subjects acceptable to polite society in order to respond to the convulsive changes in America wrought by industrialization, wave after wave of immigrants, and the consequent rapid and unchecked growth of the nation’s cities. In 1900, when George Luks painted In the Steerage, the docks of New York were crowded with ships disembarking masses of Europe’s poor. The artist depicts a throng of immigrants crowding the ship’s rail, their bundled belongings piled behind them. He presents the subject with characteristic verve. One contemporary critic admired Luks’s “quivering, feverish haste to catch and preserve the realism [of a scene].” The lively technique underscores the essential hopefulness of the journey: these people have left behind the Old World in expectation of a new life.

tags: boat, water, immigration, change, identity, impact, perspective, place, movement

Images

  • George Luks In the Steerage 1900 Painting

    In the Steerage

Related Concepts