Twentieth Century Ruin

Alexander Brook spotted this shell of a house—its yard overgrown with weeds—near his home in rural Westchester County, New York. Pictured under stormy skies, and with his daughter Biddy sitting by herself on a low stone fence, the dilapidated scene projects an air of melancholy. Although Brook later referred to the canvas as a “portrait” of a house, the title, Twentieth Century Ruin, frames the work in a different light. Painted at the height of the Great Depression, the composition can be understood as representing the economic decline and social decay wrought by this traumatic moment in United States history.