Beach Scene

James Hamilton

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Several American landscape artists, from Frederic E. Church to William Trost Richards to James Hamilton, garnered the honorific “American Turner,” after the visionary British master Joseph M.W. Turner, who died in 1852 just as the age of landscape painting in America was coming to fruition. Perhaps none better than the Philadelphian Hamilton earned the sobriquet for the expressionistic technical liberties he indulged after Turner’s example. Hamilton may have more conspicuously been a student of Turner’s contemporary John “Pandemonium” Martin. Martin’s streamlined stylization of terrestrial and celestial forms presages the same features in Hamilton’s work in both oil and watercolor, such as this otherworldly scene based probably on the Jersey shore at Atlantic City, which Hamilton began visiting in the 1860s.

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