Provenance: G. Harvey Estate

Literature: A Father. A Hero. Dr. James Dobson. Multhomah Gifts. Sisters, Oregon, 2005. p. 107 Founded in 1809, the Park Street Church in Boston, has served Bostonians for more than two centuries. G. Harvey painted the church in a handful of paintings, including here in Flower Market. The artist relates in his book The Golden Era: The American Dream how he walked the modern-day city looking for areas he could transport back to a simpler time. “Transition has also been a theme in my art. I’m drawn to eras when people were confronted with change—challenged to use change as a positive force in their lives,” Harvey writes. “The Golden Era that surrounded the turn of the 20th century in America is one of these periods. It was a point in time when many a young man and woman left the rural life for the bright lights of the city. My dad was one of these people. And, in a way, so am I. When I stop to think about it, it's been the bright lights of the all-American city that have brought about my most recent body of paintings. The contrasts of those lights against a gray day or darkened evening is so exciting to me! Perhaps no more exciting, however, than to the people who lived during that brief period when the first streetlamps turned night into a warmly lit, nonthreatening place where social activities and errands could take place. There was at this time a virtual celebration of light, and it’s the spirit of celebration that I’m trying to capture in the way light explodes across my paintings.”