Pony Ride

Luks was prone to taking long walks through the city with his sketchbook and capturing simple yet candid scenes like that of this pony ride or of the man seated on a park bench reading a newspaper. Luks was a gregarious, hard-drinking, straight-talking man who had enjoyed an early career as a vaudeville comic with his younger brother Will. As an artist, he was inspired by the works of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Frans Hals to seek out vivid urban characters such as beggars, market women, and flower sellers.