In 1932 Alice Neel moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with Kenneth Doolittle, a merchant marine who suffered from opium addiction. In December 1934, he destroyed most of her work in a jealous rage; c. 60 paintings, and over 200 drawings & watercolours. Neel said that ‘it was a frightful act of male chauvinism: that he could control me completely. I had to run out of the apartment or I would have had my throat cut. That was a traumatic experience as he had destroyed a lot of my best work, things I had done before I ever knew he existed. It took me years to get over it.’ Neel spent the next week in a West 42nd Street hotel with John Rothschild, a wealthy friend, supporter, and occasional lover. It was there that she painted this snowy cityscape.
‘I was only there for a week and did a snow scene from the window, with a church in the foreground. You look up 42nd Street and see all the people.’ Looking east, the view shows the distinctive roof of Holy Cross Church in the immediate foreground. Touches of red indicate lights on theatre frontages, while abbreviated black strokes delineate anonymous people coming and going below. This painting marks a new beginning for Neel.