American Art Collaborative

Charles Downing Lay (1877-1956) was four or five years old when his father painted this portrait. He grew up to be landscape architect for the City of New York and cofounder of one of the first professional journals in his field. Lay won a silver medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics for his design of Marine Park in Brooklyn. His work helped New York City’s leaders to understand how the public could best make use of park spaces that were created when far fewer people lived in the metropolitan area