American watercolors and drawings - Current and Coming

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Because of their sensitivity to light, watercolors and drawings are often among the hidden treasures in museums, exhibited only temporarily if at all. Many of these works, particularly drawings, relate to finished oil paintings and provide insight into the artist's creative process. It is therefore a wonderful occasion when an institution such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City mounts an exhibition of these works drawn from its extraordinarily rich collection.

The exhibition, entitled American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Highlights from the Collection, 1710-1890, marks the publication of the first volume of a two-volume catalogue of the museum's holdings in these mediums. The show, consisting of more than one hundred of the museum's most important works, is on view from September 3 to December 1 in the American Wing's Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery. The chronologically installed exhibition treats artists born before 1835, who are included in volume one of the catalogue. It begins with pastel portraits by Henrietta Johnston and concludes with works by James Abbott McNeil Whistler.

The museum's first acquisition of American watercolors took place in 1880, as the museum was moving into its large new building in Central Park. In that year the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon donated his collection of eighty-five landscapes by William Trost Richards. Since that date, through gift and purchase, the collection has increased to more than fifteen hundred American watercolors and drawings. By the 1880s watercolor was well established as an important medium in its own right in part due to the American Society of Painters in Water Colors (now the American Watercolor Society), which was founded in 1866 and brought attention to the medium through the annual exhibitions it sponsored at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

The museum's American drawings and watercolors encompass every genre from figure studies, portraits, and historical and literary works, to landscapes and scientific illustrations. There is also a significant group of works by amateur artists whose names have been lost over time. Many of the artists born before 1835 are represented by multiple examples, among them Copley West, Cole, Bierstadt, Kensett, and Whistler: The catalogue contains an informative essay about the formation of the collection by Kevin J. Avery and an excellent article by Marjorie Shelley on the materials, equipment, and training available to these artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The catalogue entries are written by curators and conservators at the museum and by outside scholars. It is published by the museum and Yale University Press and may be ordered by telephoning 800-288-2129.