Shipwreck

Thomas Cole

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This small graphite drawing is one of at least three with this title included in the same 1977 gift, all assumed to be products of a meeting of the Sketch Club, founded in 1827 by New York artists who gathered monthly to fashion individual compositions on an agreed-upon theme. In this Shipwreck, it is unsurprising that Cole, a landscapist who seldom painted marines, barely suggested the titular subject of the drawing in the vague smoke and skein of seabirds rising from the water in the distance and the possible presence of a lifeboat at right. More characteristically, he emphasized the terrestrial forms of boulder and tree in the foreground setting off the sea, which has long since swallowed the ill-fated vessel.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art