Street scene at Night, Berlin

Street Scene at Night, Berlin, painted in 1920, shows Ury in his late career continuing to explore the Berlin nocturnal street subject that had made his reputation in the 1880s and 1890s, now filtered through the changed circumstances of Weimar-era Berlin. The city had undergone traumatic transformation: defeat in the First World War, the November Revolution of 1918, political violence in the streets, economic instability. Yet Berlin's nocturnal social life — its cafés, theatres, and boulevard culture — persisted and even intensified in the atmosphere of Weimar hedonism and political anxiety. Ury's 1920 nocturnes show a city still alive at night but charged with different energy than his imperial-era street scenes. The electric light that had gradually replaced gas illumination by the 1910s produces a sharper, whiter light than the warm amber glow of earlier decades, and this shift registers in Ury's later nocturnes, which have a harder, colder luminosity. Ury himself was by 1920 an established if still contested figure in Berlin art life — long acknowledged as a pioneer of German Impressionism while remaining somewhat outside the dominant critical narrative.

The 1920 nocturne shows Ury's continued mastery of the rainy pavement reflection technique alongside changes in the light quality his city presents. Electric streetlights produce sharper, more dispersed reflections than gas lamps — the pavement patterns are more complex, the colour range cooler. Figure passages remain handled in silhouette, but the compressed urban crowd of Weimar Berlin is denser than his earlier street scenes.