At the Waterfall

David Claypoole Johnston

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Johnston built a reputation as a political cartoonist and book illustrator but, in his later career, he increasingly produced and regularly exhibited landscapes. In contrast to the more naturalistic work of New York’s Hudson River School of landscape painters, “At the Waterfall” possesses the largely synthetic look of the landscapes of Thomas Doughty, Johnston’s colleague successively in Philadelphia and Boston. More than Doughty, however, Johnston indulges here the vocabulary of the Sublime favored by Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, especially in the massive rock forms pressing into the foreground at right and left, suggesting, along with the figures poised at its edge, the fatal depth of the chasm into which the waterfall drops.

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