Lesser Ury

There are some spots of paint loss in sky area. Areas of inpainting along the right side of the painting are visible when viewed under UV.
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Lesser Ury, born in Birnbaum, the eastern province of Posen in 1861, expressed an interest in art at a young age. At eighteen, he left for Düsseldorf to study at the art academy and a year later traveled to Paris.  It was there that Ury's interest in depicting the urban experience originated.

Much of Ury's oeuvre is defined by his depictions of the Berlin metropolis. Emily Bilski notes that whereas Ury's contemporaries painted views of "Old Berlin", he chose to convey the life of the urbanite and the emerging modes of modernism, including transportation and electricity. He endeavored to show "the particular blend of closeness and distance that characterizes human encounters in the public spaces of the street and the café. Ury was mesmerized by the perceptual phenomena of pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages reflected in the wet asphalt of rain-swept streets, of street lamps casting long beams of light onto the boulevards at night, of electric light refracted off the mirrors and large windows of the city's cafes." (quoted in Berlin Metropolis Jews and the New Culture 1890-1918, University of California Press, 1999, pgs 118-119)