“I have been asked why I am particularly interested in painting Pittsburgh, Her mills with their plumes of smoke, Her high hills and deep valleys and winding rivers. Because I find beauty everywhere in Pittsburgh. It is the beauty of the past which the present has not touched. The city is my own. I have work on all parts of it, in building the blast furnaces and then in the mills and in paving the tracks that brought the first street cars out Fifth Avenue to Oakland. The filtration plant, the bridges that span the rivers, all these are my own. Why shouldn’t I want to set them down when they are, to some extent, the children of my labor and when I see them always in the light of beauty? And when I see Pittsburgh I see it with my recollections as well as the way it now looks. And so I see it both the way God made it and ways man changed it.”
