watercolor

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Image features an angelic figure facing frontally, in red-orange robe. Head indicated only through graphite sketch. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Anonymous was a Woman
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...
Image features a colorful drawing showing a vertical view of the listing bow of a boat with a broken mast, among swelling waves. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Blood in the Water
Author: Laura Fravel Related to his trip to the Bahamas, this watercolor by Winslow Homer is a study for The Gulf Stream, a painting in which a shipwrecked man lies on a battered fishing boat as sharks circle in the water. Focusing on the boat, this watercolor sets the stage for the action of the...
Image features a drawing of a night scene showing an idealized rocky landscape with falling snow. In the sky is the star of Bethlehem. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Night Visitors
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...
Image features a view of the Grand Canyon. Rock formations in the foreground and to the left are loosely sketched in pencil. The Colorado River appears as a white stripe winding through the center of the composition, between cliff faces painted with bright bands of blue, yellow, and rose washes. Dark clouds in the distance indicate an approaching storm. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Grand Scenery
This year, the Grand Canyon celebrates its 100th anniversary as a national park.  Cooper Hewitt is home to some of the earliest images of the Grand Canyon by Thomas Moran, an artist who accompanied Major John Wesley Powell’s 1873 expedition to survey areas along the Colorado River through Utah and Arizona. This expedition was not...
Image features a faun reclining in the grass, seen from behind. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Canticle of Pan
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and designs in the collection. In a 1916 profile published in Vanity Fair, Paul Thévenaz was described as a painter and a dancer. The article also identified the Swiss-born double threat as the cult leader of a movement called Rhythmician, an...
Image features a rendering of a draped female figure with fairy wings turned toward the right, holding an outstretched cord between her hands. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Beautiful Bills
With her butterfly wings, this artfully draped female figure would seem more at home decorating a theater than ornamenting U.S. currency.  Yet the designer, Walter Shirlaw, clearly labeled his drawing “Bank Note Design.” Shirlaw left school at the age of twelve and apprenticed himself to a bank note engraving company, believing that it would help...
Image features three artists at work in a large studio space.
Men at Work
In the rear of a large atelier of the French Academy in Rome, three students (called pensionnaires) are at work. One, by the window, labors over a drawing; a second stands near a bas-relief, and a third, seated, bends over a work in progress. The remainder of the space is filled with studio equipment: canvases,...
Sweet Peas
Mrs. Henrietta Maria Benson Homer exhibited Sweet Peas at the Brooklyn Art Association in April 1876, asking the relatively modest sum of $20 for the work.[1] In the same show, her son—Winslow Homer—also exhibited work.  Henrietta had taught her son the basics of drawing and painting, and helped to spark his interest in watercolor.  After...
Image features a French Romanesque church, drawn in graphite, with touches of watercolor to indicate the colors of rooftops, trees, etc. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Legacy of Beauty
Stanford White’s architectural legacy of beauty and sophistication is celebrated throughout New York City. Inspired by European architecture, White was a founder of the City Beautiful movement that spread across the country at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1878, as a young artist, White had traveled throughout Normandy and Belgium by train in...