The Grandmother Tree, near Middletown, Long Island
William Rickarby Miller
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The English émigré Miller was one of the most prolific watercolorists in America prior to the foundation of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in 1866 and his work was frequently engraved in popular periodicals. Although Miller’s style is consistent with contemporary English fashion in watercolor, it has perhaps the strongest affinity with the vision and technique of the eighteenth-century artist Paul Sandby. Miller shared with Sandby a taste for compositions with umbrageous trees in the foreground sheltering lanes and paths curving into the background, in the mode of the Norwich School of English landscape painting. The bucolic scene represented here was located in present-day Astoria, Queens.
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.