Anna Watson Stuart

Daniel Huntington

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Huntington was the preferred portraitist of respectable New York society during the 1860s. Here Mrs. Joseph L. (Anna Watson) Stuart (1817-1881), wife of an Irish-born dry goods merchant turned banker, is seated in a lush landscape. She is dressed in fashionable ermine and laces, and on her right wrist she wears a cameo bracelet, created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. This family heirloom, now in a private collection, is Saint-Gaudens’s most ambitious extant cameo project, featuring six portraits— Mr. (1803-1874) and Mrs. Stuart and their four children Anna (1840-1902), Joseph Jr. (1843-1890), Margaret (1845-1932), and Robert Watson (1847-1920). Each cameo is set in a gold mount with a shell pearl border.

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