Interior of Woods with Small Stream (from Cropsey Album)

William Trost Richards

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This charming compositional study was probably intended as an illustration for a publication—never realized—of the work of American poets, including Longfellow, Whittier, and Poe. Despite the intimacy and literary redolence of this scene, it lacks the detailed foliage that would characterize Richards’s later works of this kind, such as “The Spring” (1993.527). Indeed, its character betrays the Germanic influence of the immigrant painter Paul Weber, with whom Richards studied a few years earlier in his native Philadelphia.

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