American drawings and watercolors.(Current and coming.)

This is the moment for university collections of works on paper by American artists. In the autumn of 2004 highlights from the American drawings and watercolors at the Princeton Art Museum in New Jersey formed a traveling exhibition and catalogue. That was followed by a show and catalogue of the American print collection of Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Later this month it is the turn of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. A selection of nearly 120 works are on view from March 29 to May 29 in a traveling exhibition entitled Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art. It presents works executed between 1769 and 1969, many of which have never been on public view and some of which have only recently been donated to or purchased by the museum. The show marks the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the museum's new building.

The Hood Museum's collection originated in 1769 with the donation of a "few curious Elephants bones" from the Ohio River valley. The next, somewhat more conventional, gift was a monteith by the Boston silversmiths Daniel Henchman and Nathaniel Hurd, given to Dartmouth by the royal governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, in 1773. A recent acquisition, appropriately enough, is John Singleton Copley's exquisite pastel portrait of Wentworth. It is the earliest work in the museum's collection of American works on paper and is therefore the first item in the chronologically arranged catalogue to the exhibition.

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Today the museum houses more than sixty-five thousand objects that span numerous historical epochs and represent the artistic output of cultures throughout the world. The American collections were formed early, and, not surprisingly, many of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works were portraits of those affiliated in some way with the college--members of the board of trustees, administration, faculty, student body, and alumni. Objects made by American Indians (particularly those who lived around Dartmouth) were also accessioned early in keeping with the college's mission to educate members of local ...