b'much larger and more nished works, such as the 2005 watercolor and collage Sheep Meadow with Djeuner sur lherbe. Passing through the Mets hallowed halls on her way to and from the roof garden may have turned Ruttenbergs mind toward canonical park paintings of centuries past. In this case, a museum postcard of Manets canvas anchors her landscape near its bottom edge, absorbed in layers of vernal greenery. In yet another enveloping collage, Judgment of Paris with Central Park Skyline, Ruttenberg brought her Renaissance antecedents into the 21st century and assigned them a central role in her iconography. By this time, she had left the Mets rooftop for a more down-to-earth vantage point from which she could capture at closer range the people of Central Park through a combination of painting, drawing, and photography. Here, a screen of owering foliage opens to reveal clusters of bodies lounging on the grass. Among them, larger and more loosely rendered than the rest, we nd the guiding spirits to the artists visual universe in the form of the Judgment of Paris group. Reaching deep into the art-historical past, these gures by Ruttenberg-after-Raimondi-after-Raphael seem to signal a crucial, if ineffable, quality of her work: the sublime. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, the search for the sublime became a sort of religion for generations of Romantic painters in Europe and America who ushered in a golden age of landscape art by striving to express the awe one feels before the majesty and mystery of nature, and the invisible forces that govern it. In 1855 the renowned Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand famously exhorted his followers: Go rst to nature and learn to paint landscape, which, he preached, is fraught with high and holy meaning, only surpassed by the light of Revelation. Albert Bierstadt, a younger contemporary of Durand, soon did just that on sojourns through Americas western frontier. The studies and sketches he made became the basis for vast and luminous landscape paintings later completed in his New York studio. When Bierstadts Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak (1863) was exhibited for the rst time, New Yorkers were bowled over by the sheer size of the canvas and the majesty of its subject. Bierstadt had directly experienced the sublime and brought it back to Manhattan. To my mind, no contemporary artist has translated the sublime to an urban subject and setting as successfully as Ruttenberg. By making Central Park her cathedral, she has managed to heed Durands exhortation without leaving the city, and in many ways her work matches the vast scale, richness of detail, and pictorial grandeur achieved by Bierstadt. In fact, Rocky Mountains, Landers Peakwhich permanently resides in Central Park at the Metropolitan Museummakes a telling a comparison with Ruttenbergs Study #17 (2014). In each of these monumental vistas, groups of people gather on a green meadow that recedes into deep space dened by soaring vertical elements. The snowy summit of Bierstadts mountain range dominates the distant background just as Ruttenbergs Midtown skyscrapers loom like church spires over the scene below. Central Park may be a far cry from Bierstadts western wilderness, but it is as close as most Manhattanites can easily get in their daily lives to the sublime experience of nature. Ruttenberg is the painter of that experience. RITUAL At her customary spot, among the English elm and Red Oak trees at the top of Sheep Meadow, Ruttenbergs daily ritual is to observe and sketch visitors to the park performing rituals of their ownsunbathing, music-playing, making-out, and, on occasion, almsgiving. One of the really funny things about painting in the park, Ruttenberg remarks ironically, is that a lot people give OPPOSITEDetail of Tango.OVERLEAFStudy #52, 2018, watercolor and uorescent acrylic on paper, 110 x 180 inches. Photographed in a video frame originally created for Study #9. 27'