Berlin street scene with horse-drawn cabs

Berlin Street Scene with Horse-Drawn Cabs, painted in 1910, belongs to a transitional moment in Berlin's urban history when horse-drawn transport and motor vehicles coexisted in the city's streets. The first motorised taxis had appeared in Berlin around 1907, and by 1910 they were becoming a visible presence on the major boulevards even as horse-drawn Droschken continued to operate. Ury's attention to the horse-drawn cab in this and multiple other canvases across his career amounts to a sustained visual elegy for a specific form of urban life he had known since his arrival in Berlin in the 1880s. The 1910 date makes this one of his last paintings in which horse-drawn transport is the dominant rather than occasional element in a Berlin street composition. Ury's ability to extract the maximum optical interest from a conventional and even disappearing subject — the rain-wet street, the glinting cab lamp, the horse's wet coat — reflects his insistence on the photographic subject being secondary to the optical problem it presents.

The 1910 handling shows Ury at his mature peak: the horse-drawn cab provides a solid compositional anchor while the surrounding wet street dissolves into reflection. He distinguishes multiple types of reflected light — cab lamp reflections, shop window light, diffuse sky reflection — with the specificity of long practice. The horses are handled with appreciation for the specific optical properties of a large wet animal: matte coat surface absorbing light differently from the glossy carriage.