Antique French School Print of a Music Recital. Signed indistinctly bottom right. Published in 1908 by Fisher, Adler & Schwartz, a company in New York City. 

Overall: 31 3/8 X 26 in. 

Sight: 29 1/2 X 21 1/2 in. 

#3825 . 

In 1834 the steel pioneer Uriel Murdock built one of the first mansions on 5th Avenue on the island of Manhattan, but when he died in 1901 the area had changed dramatically and was now awash with commercial structures. In 1902 the Murdock family leased the entire four-story brownstone-front dwelling to Fishel, Adler & Schwartz, who became a highly-respected gallery company known for exhibiting modern American artists and importing works of European artists, particularly Claude Monet. The company also renovated the building extensively, including the addition of a "sky parlor" where large exhibits could be held in a two-story open space lit by a vast skylight. Their innovation sparked similar structural changes to galleries across the island and eventually the New England area, and even had an impact on how artists used light in their pieces to better fit how galleries displayed their work. Within five years the gallery had gained considerable attention for portraying Native American portraits, a first for the area, and had installed a lithographic press in the basement to augment their business by selling replications of many of their pieces as well as thousands of engravings and etchings. The sudden death of Abraham I. Adler in 1908 sent the company into turmoil, and within a month a two-day auction of the inventory was held as they planned to dismantle the business. At the time it became one of the largest sales in the history of New York City, with over $25,000 (over $850,000 in today's value) in paintings, sculptures, prints, and equipment sold. Shortly thereafter the building was leased by the piano and organ manufacturers Mason & Hamlin, who held the space until 1929, when the Great Depression led to countless new owners and periods of vacancy. In the 1960s, when the Carolina Manufacturing Company was renovating the basement, they discovered two boxes of prints in a walled-off space that had been left behind after the auction, a fascinating time capsule preserved beneath the ever-changing streets of New York City.