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Highlights from The William J. Glackens Collection in the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale by Elizabeth Thompson Colleary:

The drawing now known as "Christmas Shoppers, Madison Square" was published on December 13, 1912, as a two-page illustration in Collier’s Weekly with the title "The Day before Christmas on Madison Square". It is now acclaimed as an independent work of art, a beautifully crafted drawing filled with abundant period detail that chronicles the bustling activity at an intersection in New York City that is still heralded as a prime shopping locale.

Today the intersection where Fifth Avenue crosses Broadway at Twenty-Third Street, just west of Madison Square Park, is the center of the Flatiron District, so named because the famed Flatiron Building, completed in 1902, is situated just behind where the artist stood in order to capture this view. Visitors to the area will recognize the clock on the sidewalk just behind the horse and buggy on the left side of Fifth Avenue. The clock still stands there today, keeping accurate time as it has since it was set in place in 1909.

Unlike Glackens’s other bustling street scenes, there are no large figures in the foreground in Christmas Shoppers, Madison Square ; rather, Glackens presents a friezelike tableau of people scampering left and right and back and forth in the street and on the sidewalk. In the immediate foreground he drew them with precise detail, including a pickpocket reaching into the purse of an unsuspecting woman waiting to cross the street—one of the many vignettes that fill every inch of space within this lively drawing.