Rapids Above Hadley's Falls (No. 4 of The Hudson River Portfolio)
John Hill
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
This stretch of river occurs between Jessup's Landing and Haley's Falls on the upper Hudson, where the water "sweeps round an elbow of stupendous rocks...sunk between two magnificent walls of perpendicular cliffs." John Agg's text goes on to tell us that "towering and massive rocks are, perhaps, the most striking images of solitude and sublimity....in combination with another feature of the grand and impressive order---an intervening current of broken and confused waters---convey[ing] to the mind a most effective idea of romantic loneliness." The print comes from the Hudson River Portfolio, a monument of American printmaking produced through the collaboration of artists, a writer, and publishers. In the summer of 1820, the Irish-born William Guy Wall toured and sketched along the Hudson, then painted a series of large watercolors. Prints of equal scale were proposed—to be issued to subscribers in sets of four—and John Rubens Smith hired to work the plates. Almost immediately, Smith was replaced by the skilled London-trained aquatint engraver John Hill, who finished the first four plates, and produced sixteen more by 1825. Over the next decade, the popularity of the Portfolio stimulated new appreciation for American landscape, and prepared the way for the Hudson River School.
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.