Author: Ava Hathaway Hacker By the end of her artistic career, Mary Hallock Foote was one of the most recognized illustrators of life in the American West. Often focusing on images of women and children, her illustrations provided a vision of the West not simply as a rugged frontier but as a place where families...
Jerome Myers always had a sketchbook close at hand. When weather prevented him from sketching city life in New York, he would turn instead to self-portraits or drawings of his family. In this sketch, the artist’s daughter—Virginia—sits at a table, making a small figurine out of clay. Born in Petersburg, Virginia, Myers moved with his...
Throughout March, Object of the Week celebrates Women’s History Month. Each Monday a new post will highlight women designers in the collection. This unfinished angelic figure was likely a design for stained glass. Louise Howland King Cox designed windows for Louis Comfort Tiffany in the 1890s. However, there are few extant records about her work...
Writer and illustrator Francis Hopkinson Smith did not publish his first work until he was almost 50 years old. Trained as an engineer, he spent the first part of his career in construction and is credited with designing the foundation for the Statue of Liberty. He made charcoal drawings and watercolors throughout his life and...
Amahl and the Night Visitors was the original Hallmark Christmas movie. The one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti was the first opera composed for television in the United States. Commissioned by NBC, it was first performed on Christmas Eve in 1951 from a studio in Rockefeller Center. Sponsored by Hallmark, it was also the debut...
The collection at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum includes nearly 500 drawings from the estate of illustrator Florence Choate. Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1878, Choate studied at the Art Students League in New York where she was awarded scholarships in portrait and figure drawing. There, she met fellow student Elizabeth A. Curtis, who...
An influential painter, writer, and teacher, Kenyon Cox was perhaps best known for his murals that decorate state capitols and courthouses across the United States. The collection at Cooper Hewitt includes hundreds of his drawings, including six sketchbooks from his time as an art student—first in Ohio and then traveling to Paris—offering valuable insights...
Daniel Huntington towered over the New York art world in the nineteenth century, serving as president of the National Academy of Design and the Century Association. He began as a landscape painter working in the style of the Hudson River School, but soon expanded his repertoire to include history painting, portraiture, and literary subjects. Cooper...
A noted teacher whose students included Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement, painting scenes of everyday life in the United States. During the Great Depression, he traveled through the South and Midwest and published an autobiography—An Artist in America—recounting his experiences. The book was illustrated with sketches...
