Another and more refined feature is the
increase of elegant Art stores, where Gerome's latest miracle of
Oriental delineation, a fresh landscape of Auchenbach, or a naive gem by
Frere, is freely exposed to the public eye, beside new and elaborate
engravings, and graphic war-groups of Rogers, or the latest crayon of
Darley, sunset of Church, or rock-study by Haseltine. These free
glimpses of modern Art are indicative of the growing taste for and
interest therein among us. Pictures were never such profitable and
precious merchandise here, and the fortunes of artists are different
from what they were in the days when Cole used to bring his new
landscape to town, deposit it in the house of a friend, and personally
call the attention thereto of the few who cared for such things, and
when the fashionable portrait-painter was the exclusive representative
of the guild in Gotham.
The Astor House was the first of the large hotels on Broadway; and its
erection marks a new era in that favorite kind of enterprise and
entertainment of which Bunker's Mansion House was so long the
comfortable, respectable, and home-like ideal. Yet it is noteworthy that
inns rarely have or keep a representative character with us, but blend
popularity with fashion, as nowhere else.
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