This post was originally published on July 26, 2018. Stevengraphs are small woven pictures that depict famous buildings, historical events, iconic scenes, and prominent public figures such as members of royal families, politicians and athletes. They were produced by Thomas Stevens (English, 1828–1888), a Coventry weaver who customized the jacquard loom to produce small detailed...

  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...

Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), knighted by King Charles I of England, was a Flemish painter renowned for his portraits of members of the British Court. Trained in Antwerp by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Van Dyck, like his teacher, experimented with making prints.[1] In the late 1520s or early 1530s, Van Dyck began an extensive...

In the mid-eighteenth century, the British historian Thomas Birch (1705 – 1766) published a series of short biographies of famous figures from his nation’s past. Accompanying each of the 108 biographies was an engraved portrait of the subject, whose likeness was presented within an elaborate decorative setting.[1] These ornamental frames were designed by Hubert-François Bourguignon...

The identity of the sitter for this composition remains unknown. However, subtle details of the subject’s facial expression accentuate a sense of introspection and melancholy. Distinct contours of the jaw and cheek bones, lips, nose, and eyes were first drawn in graphite. Soft tones of cream and white paint (of varying consistencies and amounts) developed...

In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. Trude Guermonprez began experimenting with what she called “textile graphics” around 1970; she described this evolution in her work as moving toward: “More [of] an awareness of our ties with the universe…I sense a quieting of passions...

At first glance, this design drawing for the tapestry Our Mountains by Trude Guermonprez (American, b. Germany, 1910–1976) may appear to be a simple mountain landscape. A closer look reveals that the cool blue-green peaks and valleys are actually formed by three reclining faces in profile. In the background, the face of Guermonprez’s husband John...

This print is a French calendar for the first six months of the year 1792. The days of each month are lined up in a column, with the top of the column featuring a roundel with a portrait. To the right of the numerical dates are respective saints as per the Catholic calendar.  The six...

The SketchBot interface is composed of a series of 21st-century tools, including a digital camera, computer software, and a robot. But it also makes use of a natural material older than mankind itself: sand. The sand is incorporated into a multistep process that results in a portrait that can be wiped away to make way...

The phone rings. In 2011 I was invited by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City to curate an exhibit based on their collection. Like a shopper in some great, mad department store that housed many centuries’ worth of objects, I browsed and inspected their archives for a year or so. The...

In 1978, Cooper Hewitt received a gift of twenty-two jacquard woven souvenir portrait ribbons from Lisa Taylor, the museum’s director at the time. The series was produced by the Warner Woven Label Company, Inc. of Paterson, New Jersey, which every year made a single souvenir ribbon based on a famous master portrait painting in Western...