"The Metropolitan Museum began acquiring American drawings and watercolors in 1880, just ten years after its founding. Since then it has amassed more than 1,500 works executed by American artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in watercolor, pastel, chalk, ink, graphite, gouache, and charcoal. This volume documents the draftsmanship of more than 150 known artists before 1835 and that of about 60 unidentified artists of the period. It includes drawings and watercolors by such American masters as John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, George Inness, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Because the 504 works illustrate such a wide range of media, techniques, and styles, this publication is a veritable history of American drawing from the eighteenth through most of the nineteenth century."--Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

A national treasure is celebrated in this landmark publication. The Birds of America is a monumental classic, but it has never been explored like this before. This important new volume presents all the dazzling watercolors that Audubon painted for these monumental engravings. We are familiar with the prints engraved by Robert Havell Jr., but Audubon’s Aviary illuminates the original masterpieces that were created by Audubon himself and tells the story behind their creation with fresh insights and engaging quotes from his writings. These powerful paintings—all newly photographed using state-of-the-art techniques—possess a startling immediacy, vibrancy, and fluidity that link natural history, art, and a respect for the environment. These watercolors transmit Audubon’s devotion to his craft with their inscriptions and layers of media wrought with a miniaturist’s attention to detail and their revolutionary compositions, which for the first time in history depicted all the birds life-size. Audubon is considered America’s first great watercolorist, introducing innovative approaches developed over a lifetime of study. Even judged alongside today’s technology, his dramatic tableaux remain some of the most spectacular natural history documents and visually arresting works of art ever produced.

The Woodner family collection, founded by the collector Ian Woodner, presents European drawing from its first flowering in the early Renaissance to the early years of the 20th-century.

John Singer Sargents approach to watercolour was unconventional. Disregarding late-nineteenth-century aesthetic standards that called for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes, his confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. One reviewer in England, where Sargent spent much of his adult life, called his work swagger watercolours. For Sargent, however, the watercolours were not so much about swagger as about a new way of thinking. In watercolour as opposed to oils his vision became more personal and his works more interconnected. Presenting nearly 100 works of art, this book is the first major publication of Sargents watercolours in twenty years. Each chapter highlights a different subject or theme that attracted the artists attention during his travels through Europe and the Middle East: sunlight on stone, figures reclining on grass, patterns of light and shadow. Insightful essays by the worlds leading experts enhance this book and introduce readers to the full sweep of Sargents accomplishments in the medium, in works that delight the eye as well as challenge our understanding of this prodigiously gifted artist.

The fascinating story of the transformation of American watercolor practice between 1866 and 1925 The formation of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 by a small, dedicated group of painters transformed the perception of what had long been considered a marginal medium. Artists of all ages, styles, and backgrounds took up watercolor in the 1870s, inspiring younger generations of impressionists and modernists. By the 1920s many would claim it as "the American medium." This engaging and comprehensive book tells the definitive story of the metamorphosis of American watercolor practice between 1866 and 1925, identifying the artist constituencies and social forces that drove the new popularity of the medium. The major artists of the movement - Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, William Trost Richards, Thomas Moran, Thomas Eakins, Charles Prendergast, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth, and many others - are represented with lavish color illustrations. The result is a fresh and beautiful look at watercolor's central place in American art and culture.