The Ohio River near Wheeling, West Virginia

Lefevre James Cranstone

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The English genre artist Cranstone visited the United States for less than a year shortly before the Civil War and produced hundreds of ink and watercolor views of Washington, D.C., Niagara Falls, and sites in Indiana and West Virginia. Most of the surviving drawings found their way into public collections in Indiana and Boston. Cranstone’s interest in steamboat traffic along the Ohio River could have been inspired by Charles Dickens’s account of travel along the waterway, published in his “American Notes” of 1842. In the 1840s, steamboats became the principal means of transportation on the Mississippi and its tributaries, which linked America’s western frontier.

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