[Sumner Healy Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue near 57th Street, Manhattan]
Berenice Abbott American
Not on view
In 1935 Abbott embarked on a series of photographs documenting New York City. Funded by the Federal Art Project, during the next four years she made hundreds of images of the city’s monuments and architecture, including this one of Sumner Healey’s shop. Attracted to the “extraordinary montage of antiques”—anchored by a ten-foot-tall figurehead of Mars from an eighteenth-century battleship—Abbott also captured the owner’s cat, seemingly trapped on either side by the decorative dogs flanking the store’s entrance. Healey died soon after Abbott made this photograph, and the shop closed two years later.
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