Landscape and Lagoon, New Rochelle

David Johnson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The often sublime, expansive topography characteristic of Johnson’s work as a Hudson River School painter was replaced late in his career by compositions of flat terrain, often, as in this drawing, dominated by a few large trees bordering a body of water in the foreground and admitting only a glimpse of a distant prospect at either side. This drawing was undoubtedly the model for the Museum’s painting “Bayside, New Rochelle, New York” (15.30.65). The site is characteristic of those that Johnson--following French Barbizon taste--preferred as subjects in his later career: domesticated, undramatic, and riparian. This image reflects the quiet, genteel refuge New Rochelle had been, before the arrival of an amusement park in the mid-1880s, which drew thousands of visitors from the metropolitan area each summer.

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