The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings at the New-York Historical Society

About the show

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center’s showing of Drawn by New York explores the history of drawing and watercolor in New York State, and includes works highlighting the Hudson River Valley. The exhibition celebrates the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s famed river voyage. The New-York Historical Society holds one of the nation’s earliest assembled public drawings collections and includes a special concentration of works that reflect New York’s scenery, settlements, and citizens. The Society’s works reflect the country’s evolving self-image—initially, as a dependent colony maturing into a young country with a seemingly limitless frontier, and ultimately, to a world economic power with great urban centers.

The exhibition of around eighty works features one of the first-known views of New York Harbor, from 1650, and an early birds-eye-view of Niagara Falls. The development of landscape art and en plein air sketching, especially in the regions bordering the Hudson River, is a focal point, featuring works by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Cropsey, and George Harvey. Works by American artists from the Civil War through the Gilded Age cover developments in American draftsmanship, including the founding of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors and the advent of the American Pre-Raphaelites. Drawings by illustrators, such as Felix Octavius Darley for Illustrations of Rip Van Winkle, are also included. Modern and contemporary currents are represented with drawings by Oscar Bluemner, Raphael Soyer, and several others.

The exhibition originated at the New-York Historical Society, the organizer, and is accompanied by a catalogue illustrating the larger exhibition held in New York.

The exhibition at the New-York Historical Society and the publication of the catalogue and its research were generously supported by The Getty Foundation, Leonard L. and Ellen Milberg, Barbara and Richard Debs, Pam and Scott Schafler, Eli Wilner & Company, Inc., The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, Alexander Acevedo, and Graham Arader.