John Watts

Robert Ball Hughes

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hughes apparently received a commission to execute a portrait of John Watts soon after his arrival in New York in 1829. Watts (1749–1836), a prominent New York leader, had been speaker of the New York State Assembly as well as a member of Congress and the first judge for Westchester County. It seems likely that it was the bust of Watts that Hughes exhibited at the 1830 annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, listing it only as “An Eminent Member of the New York Bar.” In early 1906 Watt’s grandson General John Watts de Peyster offered to give the Metropolitan Museum the plaster bust of Watts, or a bronze cast of it. The museum selected a bronze that had been cast in Paris.

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