H’ e’s a painter’s painter,” said Laura Duggan, standing at a reception for artist Daniel Bennett Schwartz, a talented draftsman who works in oil, watercolor, and pastel, and of whom Tom Wolfe has said, “If one is looking for a 20th-century Winslow Homer – and who wouldn’t be – I guess he is it. We can add the 21st century, too, for good measure.”

Mr. Schwartz greeted guests such as illustrator and caricaturist David Levine and painter Harvey Dinnerstein, who had come to celebrate the publication of “Portrait of the Artist, Running”(Ruder Finn Press,132 pages, $30), a close study of Mr. Schwartz’s most important painting. Mr. Schwartz was dressed in a black and white herringbone jacket, which looked gray from the distance; a navy shirt in a tattersall pattern; and a red tie with black dots that matched the color of the sun drenched van in his masterwork.

The 9-foot-wide painting is the culmination of 15 years work from 1969 to 1984. It began as a group of joggers, he said, but evolved into a band of men running “resolutely” in the street headed toward a light. The viewer cannot tell what they are running toward or away from. A man in the center – his face obscured by shadow – turns away and refuses to run with the pack, but his exit is blocked by a group of wild dogs. Over the years, Mr. Schwartz said, the center figure evolved into a self-portrait.

“The whole feeling of the painting,” Mr. Schwartz writes in the book, “was a kind of interior look at my state of mind in New York City in the 1970s, which was pretty bad. I thought the city was falling apart. I hated the subway, the walls, the graffiti. It was a really rotten time.” The painting is personal: The artist refers in the book to narrowly avoiding being mugged in the 1970s.

In his career as an artist-reporter, Mr. Schwartz covered the My Lai massacre trial for Life magazine. But in this painting, he is reporting on an age. The painting enters the mass psychology of a city wracked by budgetary disarray as well as looting following the 1977 blackout (think of headlines such as “Ford to City: Drop Dead” or the title of Jonathan Mahler’s new book “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning”). Mr. Schwartz’s painting appears much more unsettling now, when the city is relatively orderly but anxiety remains, partly due to the events of September 11, 2001.

Part of the bewitching power of the painting “Portrait of the Artist, Running” derives from the uncertainty about the runners’ goal. As the artist writes, “these men are clearly not running for recreation.” One feral dog in Mr. Schwartz’s painting stands, humanlike, on hind legs, ears uncannily perked up, as another dog looks forward at what may be the cause of the onrush.

From Alfred Hitchcock’s “Birds” to Nathanael West’s “Day of the Locust,” packs, herds, and flocks bring ominous foreboding. In his refusal to join the race, the artist steps out of a human riptide on urban pavement but remains stuck in gridlock.

David Finn, who took the photos for the book, introduced Mr. Schwartz. The book contains various studies that Mr. Schwartz painted, drew, and accumulated. It thus shows the artist’s struggle over the painting. It is significant that Mr. Finn’s specialty is photographing sculpture, for the careful composition of the figures in “Portrait of the Artist, Running” evoke an architectural frieze. Painter and writer Mindy Lewis described Mr. Schwartz’s work as both “classical and abstract.”

Longtime friend Gay Talese said the artist’s laid-back personality “doesn’t hit you all at once, it takes time.” Mr. Talese first met Mr. Schwartz when they were both contributing to Esquire magazine in the early 1960s.

Others seen at the party were artist Annamarie Trombetta, who described Mr. Schwartz’s work as combining intuition and a sense of immediacy. Also present were Jillian Lubow and Gunnar Bauska, who have both modeled for Mr. Schwartz’s paintings.

The artist grew up in Queens and attended an art class at the Little Red School House. One schoolmate was Edward Sorel. He went to the High School of Music and Art before attending the Art Students League. Influences on his work range widely from Thomas Eakins to Paolo Uccello.

In the book, Mr. Schwartz praises Balthus for using his skills, drawing composition, and color to focus on producing a large-scale masterwork that says something universal and powerful. Mr. Schwartz has done this in “Portrait of the Artist, Running,” in which overlapping runners are a meditation on mortality. They recall the lines from John Keats’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

What mad pursuit? What struggle to scape?
…
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe.