Girgenti (The Temple of Juno Lacinia at Agrigentum)

William Stanley Haseltine

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the 1870s, while living and working in Rome, Haseltine’s watercolor technique shifted away from nearly monochromatic images made in preparation for oil paintings to more fully realized watercolors made for exhibition. During one of three visits to the island of Sicily in 1881, he painted this near view of the Temple of Juno Lacinia (480–500 b.c.) in Girgenti (present-day Agrigento). At center, he emphasizes the ruin’s most eloquent feature: the single fragment of architrave supported by two intact columns at the southeast corner of the temple.　Essential to his composition is the glowing afternoon Mediterranean light that illuminates the edges of the monument and casts long shadows.

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