Nullary Sources

Amazing, amazing cutaway drawing of the main branch of the New York Public Library from the May 14, 1911 issue of The New York Times’s Sunday Magazine. This scan comes from Sunday Magazine, which has a PDF of the full article for your perusal.

The drawing is by American illustrator Harry M. Pettit. Wikimedia Commons has three pieces of concept art for the Brooklyn Museum which are also fantastic. Here’s a short bio, courtesy of the George Glazer Gallery:

Harry McEwen (H.M.) Pettit was an American architectural painter and illustrator who enjoyed a long career from the 1890s to the 1930s.  Born in Rock Island, Illinois, he worked as an artist for his hometown newspaper before moving to New York City at age 23, where he worked in interior decoration.  At the turn of the century, he illustrated for publications such as Leslie’s Weekly and Harper’s Weekly and books such as King’s Views of New York.Nicknamed “the bird’s-eye view artist” he frequently produced prospective views and conceptual renderings for proposed architectural designs, both as illustrations and as larger commissioned works, such as a 15-foot mural for the Duquesne Works steel mill in Pittsburgh (c. 1920) and a 27-foot mural, The Gary Works and City of Gary, Indiana, for which he won a medal at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.  Other clients included Standard Oil, Deere & Co., the Pennsylvania and Grand Central train stations in New York, West Point Military Academy, and universities including Northwestern, Loyola, Columbia, NYU, CUNY and George Washington University.  Among his popular images was King’s Dream of New York (1908), a futuristic view of the city with the skies filled with dirigibles, one of many works he did for the publisher Moses King.  By 1915, Pettit had moved to Chicago and was the official artist for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933-34, and the New York World’s Fair in 1939-40, though he died without completing his painting of the latter event.