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8 This second visit prompted him to produce some more questioning and deadpan images of New York: impressive and yet more than a little chilling, for example in the haunting drypoint Three AM: A Corner of Madison Square at Night which apparently impressed the young Austrian film maker Fritz Lang when he first saw it in c.1922 and shaped his ideas for presenting the city of the future in his sci-fi film classic Metropolis (1926). The composition of other works such as Third Avenue (1921) and From the Ferry (1921) suggested he had absorbed the distinctive view of New York, visually impressive for being an unashamedly grubby 'city of industry' created before the First World War by painters of the New York-based 'Ashcan' School such as Robert Henri and John Sloan. A more critical, satirical element can be found in New York Stock Exchange (1921) – not overly admiring of American adherence to unfettered, boom-era, greed-driven capitalism in its rawest form – which can be related to his growing friendship with the American 'dirty realist' and member of the 'Ashcan' group, George Bellows. Nevinson was later to write that Bellows, who went on to purchase a number of Nevinson's images of New York including the oil and drypoint versions of Looking Through Brooklyn Bridge (1921), had been one of the most impressive American painters he had met, although he suspected in an intriguing anticipation of verdicts on his own career that Bellows would one day be better appreciated for his lithographs than for his oils. The majority of Nevinson's later prints of Manhattan were exhibited at the Keppel Galleries in July 1921, in a joint exhibition he held with Walter Sickert in Chicago at the Roullier Galleries in January 1926 and in a solo exhibition at the Kraushaar Galleries in New York in October 1926. Critical reaction to the 1921 exhibition was initially muted but as time passed influential American commentators and cultural opinion-formers, such as celebrated photographer Alfred Stieglitz, collector Lillie P. Bliss (one of the three founders of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1929) and Harold Ross, founder in 1925 of The New Yorker magazine, were prepared to acknowledge that Nevinson was one of the few contemporary modernists, along with Joseph Stella, John Marin, Charles Sheeler and Albert Gleizes to have caught the reality of New York as modern streamlined industrialised Bablyon. Nevinson did not visit the United States again after 1920. He later happily acknowledged he wished to concentrate on favourite atmospheric locales that were closer to home – in his beloved Paris, which he described in the Daily Chronicle in October 1929 as the 'home of all good aesthetic and intellectual ideas', for example in such fine and compelling drypoints as La Butte Montmartre (1922) and Le Quartier Latin (1922) – which intriguingly possess a sinister expectant stillness reminiscent of the images of New York Edward Hopper was beginning to create – and lithographs such as Place du Tertre (1919-20) and Sur La Terrasse, La Parnasse (1919-20) which celebrate the charms, overt or more restrained, of two of Nevinson's favourite areas of Paris that he had explored at length in the years before the First World War, Montmartre and Montparnasse. At the same time he was keen to explore favourite haunts in London. Nevinson was very proud of the fact that he had been born a Londoner – in Keat's Grove, Hampstead – and even was to claim, for example in 1930, that he really was a Cockney. From 1901 to 1919 he lived in the family home of 4 Downside Crescent, Belsize Park, and, after an abortive stint living in a flat over Warren Street Underground station (1919-21) he spent the rest of his life in a studio-home off Haverstock Hill at No 1 Steele's Studios. It is telling perhaps that one reason why the location attracted him was for its close proximity to The Load of Hay, John Constable's favourite tavern after sketching trips to Hampstead Heath in the 1820's and 30's. Throughout the 1920's he regularly exhibited scenes of quiet London corners and of its many bridges over the River Thames in oils, pastel and in etching and aquatint which he had taken up with a passion early in 1922. He was later to claim that Sickert Three AM: A Corner by Madison Square at Night, 1920. Page 81