Icecream Pavilion

Icecream Pavilion (アイスクリーム・パヴィリオン) is a 1922 oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, painted in New York during his Art Students League period under John Sloan. The composition shows a New York street pavilion selling ice cream — a Coney Island or Brooklyn boardwalk subject rather than a Manhattan street — with a gathered crowd of urban patrons in summer clothing arranged around the small commercial structure. The palette is brighter and more saturated than the night-scene paintings of the same year, and the subject (the modern leisure life of the New York working classes) is characteristic of the Ashcan and post-Ashcan urban realism within which Shimizu was working. The painting belongs to a group of 1922 New York paintings — Chinatown at Night, In Front of a Theater, the Icecream Pavilion — that together constitute Shimizu's principal documentary record of his New York years, and it is in the collection of the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts. The image is reproduced from a high-resolution scan released to Wikimedia Commons under public-domain terms (the artist died in 1945, placing the work in the public domain in Japan and the source country).