Evening at the Lock, Napanoch, New York

Evening at the Lock, Napanoch, New York

Theodore Robinson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1893, the year after he returned from his last visit to Giverny, Robinson taught plein-air painting at Napanoch, New York, in the Shawangunk Mountains, and chronicled that still-rural region in several canvases. Here, he commemorated an old canal that used to facilitate the transport of coal from Pennsylvania to New York City but had been rendered obsolete by more efficient railroad lines. In contrast to the grandiloquent responses to the same region by the earlier Hudson River School painters, Robinson’s subtle view demonstrates the American Impressionists’ determination to represent the commonplace.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Evening at the Lock, Napanoch, New YorkEvening at the Lock, Napanoch, New YorkEvening at the Lock, Napanoch, New YorkEvening at the Lock, Napanoch, New YorkEvening at the Lock, Napanoch, New York

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.