Union Park, New York

Sarah Fairchild

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

When amateur artist Sarah Fairchild painted this cityscape, the park at Union Square was relatively new. It had been built in the early 1830s on vacant land extending between Broadway and Fourth Avenue above Fourteenth Street. The gushing fountain shown in the middle ground was constructed in 1842 to mark the completion of the Croton Aqueduct, which for the first time assured New Yorkers of a sufficient water supply. Without the Croton system in place, the population of Manhattan could not have doubled, as it did, between 1845 and 1855. Perhaps to underscore the importance of water to Manhattanites, Fairchild shows a man pointing in excitement with his cane and a couple within the park staring raptly at the fountain’s plumes of spray

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