On the Ausable

James David Smillie

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Smillie was a member of a respected artistic family, including his brother, George Henry, and his father, James, whom James David followed into a career in engraving. For a time beginning in the 1860s Smillie earnestly devoted himself to landscape in both oil and watercolor. A close associate of Samuel Colman, the first president of the American Watercolor Society, Smillie accompanied Colman and other painters to the Adirondacks’ Keene Valley, through which the Ausable flows, for several seasons beginning in 1868. With lively touches of both transparent and opaque tints, Smillie captures well the effect of high, hot sunlight and the icy effervescence of the cascade.

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