New York from Heights Near Brooklyn [The Wall View from Brooklyn]

John Hill

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hill’s expansive aquatint shows how undeveloped the Brooklyn side of the East River, opposite Manhattan, remained well into the nineteenth century. To sketch this view, the Irish watercolorist Wall stood near the present-day junction of Court Street and First Place, on a hill later leveled. The foreground pond served Cornell’s Mill and the windmill at right belonged to Pierrepont’s Gin Distillery. Hill, who worked in London before moving to Philadelphia in 1816, then New York in 1822, used his skills as an aquatint engraver to produce a series of prints that document New York’s appearance from the water.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.