A celebration of the diverse world of American watercolors from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, featuring works from the Harvard Art Museums’ collection Watercolor holds a special place in the history of American art. For generations of artists, the medium has provided a space for innovation and experimentation, allowing practitioners to let their imagination loose and to reflect on process and perception. Its rise to the status of fine art in the decades following the Civil War is well documented, yet its continued role as a testing ground and means of generating new ideas throughout the twentieth century has received comparatively less attention. This volume considers continuity and change in the American watercolor tradition over a century of production through the lens of the Harvard Art Museums’ collection. Works by well-known watercolorists such as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler are included, as well as surprising additions from Zelda Fitzgerald, Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg, and many others. In the spirit of the medium, the authors take a fluid and open-ended approach to the topic, offering both personal and scholarly reflections that invite readers to ponder the influence of these works on their own experience of the world. In addition to contextual essays, there are close readings of singular works and examinations of the unique material characteristics of the watercolor medium. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums Exhibition Schedule: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (May 20–August 13, 2023)

The Harvard University Art Museums hold one of the world's finest collections of early 19th-century drawings. The nearly 500 works reproduced in this catalogue include the most significant groups of drawings outside France by the masters of the age - David, Gericault, Ingres, Delacroix and Prud'hon. Drawing is the most direct and spontaneous of all artistic media, and many studies in the collection vividly evoke the genesis of some of the period's enduring images. A design by Jacques-Louis David marks a stage in the development of his major revolutionary composition, The Oath of the Tennis Court, while two precious sketchbooks, consisting of more than 100 drawings, document the painstaking evolution of David's greatest Imperial project, the massive canvas depicting The Coronation of Napoleon. Of parallel significance is a large-scale and beautifully rendered drawing for what is arguably the peerless masterpiece of Romantic painting, Gericault's Raft of the Medusa.