Nighttime View from the 91st Floor at Tower No. 1, World Trade Center, New York

This nighttime view of Manhattan is one of a series of works that Stanley Friedman painted in his studio on the 91st-floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center several weeks before the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Several years later he described the feelings he experienced when he was working on these pictures: "Painting a cityscape at night . . . was both a wonderful and sometimes strange experience. . . . I had painted ground-level skylines before, but this was different-airplane-like. At night . . . [my studio] was both quiet and dark. Few lights were turned on, so that one could get the full effect of the night-lit city. And this city seemed vertical, not horizontal, like a vast curtain tilted up in front of the windows. The light and dark areas made exciting patterns of luminosity and void-no longer streets, bridges and buildings, but galaxies and voids filled with movement. My favorite thing about working in the dark was holding a pen flashlight in one hand while I painted with the other, trying not to lose my place due to afterimages." This painting is one of two works that Friedman removed, quite by chance, from his World Trade Center studio several days before the building was destroyed. The other six paintings in this series were lost.