Martin Leisser painted 'Oakland' around 1914, with the imposing buildings of Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) seen across Junction Hollow.

By Patricia Lowry
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

If everything looks fresh in Martin B. Leisser's "Oakland," perhaps it's because it was.

Mr. Leisser, for many years the dean of Pittsburgh artists, was about 75 when he completed the painting in the mid-1910s, with a career behind him and two more decades of painting still to come. But the buildings on the hilltops were young, newly minted to do the work of their namesake benefactor in raising up the children of the mill workers to a better life.

	Lake Fong, Post-Gazette The view now from South Bouquet Street in Oakland using a similar aspect as Martin Leisser's painting "Oakland." Click photo for larger image.

On a white winter morning, Mr. Leisser depicts Andrew Carnegie's great cultural achievements in Pittsburgh: the museums and library and the school that bear his name, facing each other across the valley of Junction Hollow. New-fallen snow has purified the landscape, covered the scruffy vegetation with a downy blanket. The Carnegie Institute of Technology buildings on the upper right are aglow in a soft, warm light. The village below isn't stirring, but already the Schenley Bridge carries traffic: people, not cars and carriages. Carnegie sited his school so that students could put to good use the museums and library across the hollow.

The vista had great personal significance for Mr. Leisser. For one thing, it was he, along with his friend, astronomer John Brashear, who persuaded their mutual friend Carnegie to include an art school at the Carnegie Technical Schools, which he'd founded in 1900 (the name was changed in 1912, and changed again to Carnegie Mellon University in 1967).

For another, Mr. Leisser's home, which he shared with his wife and brother, had been on Woodlawn Avenue, now Margaret Morrison Street, near its intersection with Forbes Avenue. The house would later be purchased by the school; the land on which it sat is now an athletic field.

There is much to absorb in "Oakland," but again and again the eye is drawn to Machinery Hall, now Hamerschlag Hall, the temple-like building with a tower perched on the edge of the hollow.

"This side [of the building] has served as a facade for the whole Carnegie Tech group plan from outside of the campus, and has anchored the reciprocal architectural relationship with the Carnegie Institute across Junction Hollow," Martin Aurand writes in his new book, "The Spectator and the Topographical City."

"It also serves as a scenographic element within the topographical setting of greater Oakland."

Although the symbolism may have been unintended, in the painting Pittsburgh's higher aspirations seem to float above its working world, above the trains and the barns and the houses where coal furnaces had to be fed by early risers.

But Machinery Hall's lofty classicism was a guise; the building housed the school's power plant and for many years it was a rite of passage for freshmen to shovel the coal.

The painting, which seems not to have been exhibited or published in living memory and perhaps longer, came to light when Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publisher John Robinson Block and executive editor David Shribman visited Carnegie Museum of Art in search of a Pittsburgh winter scene to feature on the cover of the Christmas Day newspaper. One of the reasons they chose "Oakland" was that it is so little known.

Although the date in the lower right corner is 1909 -- a year by which much of the original Carnegie Tech campus was complete -- the painting is thought not to have been completed until 1914 at the earliest, the year Machinery Hall was finished.

Carnegie Museum of Art fine arts curator Louise Lippincott points out that Machinery Hall's tower seems to have been a later addition to the painting. A faint seam is visible in the building, and a patch of sky behind the tower is darker than the rest, as if it had been overpainted.

Last week, "Oakland" was in the hands of Carnegie conservator Chantal Bernicky, who had removed the varnish layer and was about to begin restoring the few small places where paint had flaked away. People who are interested in seeing the painting after reading about it will be able to do so; it will hang in the Scaife Galleries near other early 20th-century works.

The museum purchased "Oakland," which measures about 30 inches by 50 inches, in 1973 from a Canonsburg collection with funds from the Sarah Mellon Scaife family. Its exact provenance and exhibition history are unknown.

Mr. Leisser, who traveled and painted widely in the United States and abroad, was raised in Birmingham (now the South Side), where his father, Balthazer Leisser, worked as a packer in a glass factory. He and his wife Johanna were natives of Frankfurt, Germany, and settled first here in a log house, later moving to 17th Street, where they raised their sons Martin and Charles. Martin Leisser's first job was painting flowers on safes and scales; he saved his money and in 1868 began several years of study at academies in Munich and Paris at his mother's urging.

In the 1870s, Mr. Leisser began the city's first life drawing class and later was headmaster of the Pittsburgh School of Design for Women. After his 1883 marriage to Sarah Montgomery Stewart, the couple lived in Europe for five years. He produced thousands of portraits, town scenes and landscapes over a 75-year career, including two portraits of Carnegie.

Where was Mr. Leisser when he painted "Oakland"? The point of view seems to have been from the upper floor of a house in the 300 block of Bouquet Street, where the backs of houses on the northeast side of the street overlook the hollow.

Today the scene is much the same but also irrevocably altered. Roberts Hall has been added to the rear of Hamerschlag Hall. In Junction Hollow, the barns in the foreground are gone, but many of the other buildings remain. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that the valley floor now is filled with parked cars.

One wishes for a heavy snowfall to make it all white again.