Aurora

James M. Hart

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

James McDougal Hart and his brother, William, were productive and respected landscape painters who trained in Albany but built significant careers in New York City and Brooklyn. This drawing, whose title identifies the town on Lake Cayuga in upstate New York that became a popular summer resort in the 1850s, relates to several known paintings made during the Civil War years. Like many Hudson River School painters, most of whom drew in small sketchbooks, James Hart was a subtle draftsman, here tenderly shaping the foreground of sunlit trees and cottages and barely tracing the a shore of the lake.

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