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Picturing a World

Women on an omnibus

It’s hard to know why some topics fascinate us. I ride public transportation whenever I can; maybe that's why depictions of riders in a train or on an omnibus always catch my eye. For my fiction, moreover, it just seems part of world-building to know how my characters get from one place to another and how long it takes them. Mary Cassatt's In the Omnibus" reminds me of crossing the Charles River on the Red Line in Boston during the day when the cars are sometimes uncrowded. For Daumier's more typically crowded omnibus, click here.

For ANONMITY, I was delighted to find Francis Luis Mora's paintings of New York subway riders and the interior of Out of Town Trolley. (As readers of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime know, people in this country used to be able to go between towns and cities on trolleys. And we call private automobiles progress! Ha.)

For previous posts on subway and train interiors, click here and here.

For more of prints by Mary Cassatt in the series to which this one belongs, click here.

For a painting of a woman and child among riders in an omnibus by Julie Delance-Feurgard (1859–1892), click here.
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