This drawing is signed “From Nature, by E. Whitefield” and depicts a view of Storm King Mountain from across the Hudson River on the base of Breakneck Ridge. Today it is possible to visit the same viewpoint where Edwin Whitefield sketched the composition and admired the beauty of the landscape. Edwin Whitefield was born in...

This Object of the Day  celebrates one of many treasured objects given by Clare and Eugene V. Thaw to Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.  It is republished here in memory of Eugene V. Thaw. Click on this link to read more about the Thaws and their gifts to Cooper Hewitt.    Heads down with pencils and brushes...

This striking drawing, titled Altar Mensa for the Borghese Chapel in the Santa Maria Maggiore, is by a lesser known but influential architect, Mario Asprucci the Younger.  Using water color paint to achieve vibrant illustrations of various, colored marbles and metals, Asprucci captures the architecture’s sumptuous materials and allegorical themes. The Borghese Chapel was originally...

LIFE magazine deemed him as a “dressmaker in silver” in 1939, but Tommi Parzinger was an incredibly versatile designer, celebrated for his furniture, wallpaper, packaging and textiles.[1] Parzinger designed furnishings for socialites, decorators, and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and the Rockefellers and he established himself as a man about town in the glamorous circles of...

Frederick Krieg’s colorful design for a two-part part tile pattern is depicted in a three by three grid.  The result is an alternating composition that maintains unity through repeated colors (light blue, bisque, and charcoal) and angles (hexagonal and inverted).  Krieg’s precision is all the more impressive given the medium: watercolor paint. A self-taught designer...

This spring is extra-special at the Cooper Hewitt because the garden is completely renovated and once again open to anyone who needs a nice place to sit on a sunny afternoon. In anticipation of fun times and fair weather, we wanted to feature this vibrant floral wallpaper that presents its own take on 1960s “flower power.”...

This splendid presentation drawing was prepared for the prestigious civic commission to redesign the Place de la Concorde, one of the great public squares of Paris. When the viceroy of Egypt, Muḥammad ʿAlī, offered France an obelisk from the reign of Ramses II as a gift in 1831, the German-born designer Jakob Ignaz Hittorff was...

Heads down with pencils and brushes in hand, a group of elegantly dressed women are engrossed in the act of drawing. Meanwhile, two male instructors, conspicuous in their dark frock coats, observe their work. Yet these are not art students learning their trade in a master’s studio. Rather, this remarkably detailed watercolor by an unknown...

This drawing is the creation of Jean-Jacques Lequeu, a French architect and draftsman of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A faint inscription in the bottom right corner of the drawing announces that it is a project for a monument at the entrance to the navy arsenal in Toulon, a major port in the...