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

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center’s showing of this exhibition explored the history of drawing and watercolor in New York State, and included works highlighting the Hudson River Valley. The exhibition celebrated 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 featured 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, was 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 covered 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, were also included. Modern and contemporary currents were represented with drawings by Oscar Bluemner, Raphael Soyer, and several others.

The exhibition originated at the New-York Historical Society, the organizer, and was 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. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.