American watercolors and drawings. (Current and Coming).

Because of their sensitivity to light, watercolors and drawings are often among the hidden treasures in museums, exhibited only temporarily if at all. Many of these works, particularly drawings, relate to finished oil paintings and provide insight into the artist's creative process. It is therefore a wonderful occasion when an institution such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City mounts an exhibition of these works drawn from its extraordinarily rich collection.

The exhibition, entitled American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Highlights from the Collection, 1710-1890, marks the publication of the first volume of a two-volume catalogue of the museum's holdings in these mediums. The show, consisting of more than one hundred of the museum's most important works, is on view from September 3 to December 1 in the American Wing's Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery. The chronologically installed exhibition treats artists born before 1835, who are included in volume one of the catalogue. It begins with pastel portraits by Henrietta Johnston and concludes with works by James Abbott McNeil Whistler.

The museum's first acquisition of American watercolors took place in 1880, as the museum was moving into its large new building in Central Park. In that year the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon donated his collection of eighty-five landscapes by William Trost ...