Scenes of New York City celebrates the promised gift of 130 works from the Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection to the New-York Historical Society. The Hirschfeld promised gift is at once a collection of individual works by talented artists from the 19th and 20th centuries, a series of vivid "snapshots" of the iconic city, and a tapestry weaving a narrative of Gotham's vibrant history. These fascinating celebrations of New York City-paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints, and sculpture whose strength lies in the 20th century-include 113 works by 82 American and European artists not currently represented in the collection. They expand the Museum's holdings in the modern era and help to diversify them, adding numerous works by pivotal artists including Isabel Bishop, Marc Chagall, Fernand Leger, George Grosz, Keith Haring, Franz Kline, WIllem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Louise Nevelson, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol among many others. The catalogue features an introductory essay covering the sweeping history of New York City, an interview with the collector Elie Hirschfeld, 110 scholarly entries about the 130 works, and comparative material that illuminates the history of the City and the artistic contributions in the works of art

Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking marks the first sustained study of pendant paintings: discrete images designed as a pair. It opens with a broad overview that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, religious history, and aesthetic theory and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the pendant format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor's Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and Thomas Cole's Departure and Return (1837) shed new light on canonical antebellum American artists and their practices. The chapter on Titian Ramsay Peale's Kilauea by Day and Kilauea by Night (1842) presents new material that pushes the geographical boundaries of American art studies toward the Pacific Rim. The book contributes to American art history the study of a characteristic but as yet overlooked format and models for the discipline a new and productive framework of analysis focused on the fundamental yet complex way images work back and forth with one another.