Charles Friederic Ulrich - In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden, 1884.

 

      Castle Garden in New York City was the country’s first immigration station and processed a large refugee population in the late 19th century. Here, people from different countries talk, rest, and pass the time waiting for inspection and registration. Four figures draw our attention. In the centre, a mother nurses her baby — a trunk label suggests they may be from Sweden. A red-haired girl sits just behind them, and a uniformed man smokes a pipe to the right. About two dozen men, women, children, and a baby sit in rows of wooden benches or on traveling trunks in this horizontal painting. Their skin is mostly pale with some ranging more toward pink and others toward tan. A woman nursing a baby sits in the centre of the composition.